Group Project Part 6 - Reflection

At time of writing, we don't present our work to the client until tommorow, but I may as well post my final thoughts regarding this group project now, since we have essentially finished all of our work.

As soon as I found out that there was to be a group project for this module, I initially felt very cynical towards this particular assignment, as in my first two years at University, in all the previous group assignments I have done, I've either had the majority of the workload dumped onto me, or I wasn't given enough work to do, or found that the rest of my group wasn't taking the work seriously enough - however, this time around neither of these situations occured, and this was perhaps one of if not the best group I have ever been a part of. For the first time in any group project I've been involved in, everybody really pulled their weight and the final result from all four of us was very pleasing, and really goes to show how much effort we all put in together.

I'll make comments about the things I have learnt later on in this entry, but first of all is a shout out to the other three members of the group:

Craig seemed to take on a front-man role right from the very start: of all the original three members of the group (myself, Craig and Ryan), he seemed to have the best communication skills. Not only did he provide very detailed modelling skills for his left side of the machine, but he also provided us with all the information that the rest of us needed, such as how the machine works, as well as the photos that were taken of the boiler pump which we all used as references for our modelling. As well as this, he also consistently provided the rest of us with very helpful constructive feedback.

Ryan appeared to have some fun working with fire in 3DS Max, and his right side of the machine, despite being started on fairly late into the project, also turned out to look very good, and like Craig, his representation of his part of the machine was very much like its real life counterpart. He also went out of his way to add extra detail such as the text at the top of the machine, and the way he connected the machine to a stove-like object was a nice touch. Sadly, while not his fault at all, and despite how good it initially looked, we couldn't even use the flame he made because of a technical error that I mentioned in a previous entry, which turned it blue for no apparent reason, so I had to recycle a flame I had made in an earlier project instead. I feel he did a great job with his part, and he even aided me with the camera positioning in the final video, however it was a shame to see his fire go to waste.

Adam, the late addition to our group, initially did not seem to be able to contribute much, but for understandable reasons. However, within the last few weeks he really started to pull his weight, taking time out of his incredibly busy schedule to provide us with with an excellent and suitable environment, a boiler room, for the machine. And for the final video to be used when presenting to the client, he also provided a very suitable voiceover. It was all thanks to his additional help that we went from being The Little Group That Could, to being able to produce some very impressive work in the end.

As for myself, I was initially handed the task of animating anything that required it, since both Craig and Ryan were very impressed with my skills from a previous assignment. I was more than happy to take up this role, being given the middle piece of the machine which so happened to be the only part that required animation. While my model wasn't completely accurate when compared to the middle part of the real machine, I feel that it still looked pretty good in the end, and it shows how far my modelling skills have developed over the past year and a half. For this project I also learned to use bump mapping for the first time, which really helped to give our models quite a realistic paint-like texture.


As far as this group went, we hardly ever came across any real problems: there were no argumanets over things going wrong, and we happily worked together towards our goal of completing this assignment. Overall, I thoroughly enjoyed working as part of this team, and I'm very satisfied with both our final result, and the skills I've learnt from this module, including new modelling techniques, and teamwork skills - and this project, along with another recent one, has enabled me to develop a much more positive attitude towards team-based assignments.