I was wrapping my summer break by self-studying Rigging and Python. I planned to create a portfolio piece in august but I didn't considered SIGGRAPH 2020 and project. At the start of august, we got the list of the projects for my Fall 2020 semester. I was excited about 5 of them, most of them were delivery project involving 3D animation and with the hope that I will get into one of my selected choices, I started talking to the faculty and telling them my choices and why I fit in that project. Luckily I got into one of them but with a catch- there were no programmers in our team. As my nature goes, I got excited when I saw an opportunity to learn about game engines and I volunteered to be the only programmer in the team with no game programming experience. I thought that game development was similar to developing a website or a stand-alone application but I was so wrong. I found that I was unable to write a single line of code until I learned how the game engine works. Oops... I kind of jumped to the post-mortem. This was supposed to be the pre-mortem. Lets go ahead with the pre-mortem...
Apart from the excitement for the project and about learning Unreal engine, I was waiting for SIGGRAPH 2020 online. I couldn't get the volunteering opportunity so I attended the conference as an attendee. It was up for 5 days with the things I wish I could learn at the first watch. There were video-on-demands on topics such as animation, rigging, rendering, etc. I met lots of amazing people and big personalities, made some friends and watched the Festival where 30 short animated movies were shown. I was blown away by that. I guess I should make a dedicated post for SIGGRAPH 2020.
To sum up my pre-mortem, I told my faculty advisor of the project that I will learn Unreal engine 4 in 2-3 weeks, Blueprints to be very specific and to create a prototype by mid-sem.
Read out the experience of this semester in the next post.
Peace.