This was my first real project, and the first one I had to do without a single tutorial or helper. I find that it is quite significant to my progress because it helped me realize how incredibly important pre-production is. The reason for that is that this project had a LOT of backtracking, mostly because of what it was. You couldn't just build a house; you had to build pieces of a house to assemble them perfectly. This was incredibly hard because you had to make sure you had pieces for walls, half walls, corners, floors, doors, stairs, windows, and roofs, and that they all fit together. This was especially hard because you had to size everything perfectly together on a grid so it would fit nicely. In the end, I think that this project really laid out for me the importance of planning, and I hope to use that well in the future.

This project was challenging because it was the first time I designed something entirely on my own without relying on a video. I had to re-attempt it several times, but kept pushing until I completed it. One main difficulty was realizing I needed to innovate. Initially, I recreated what was shown, just changing colors. Eventually, I began to change some things, like the mushrooms, and creating new flowers. This project prepared me for working independently and making my own models. I plan to use these skills soon on the final project and hope to model without help.

This tutorial was one of my favorites because of how it demonstrated how much one cube can change. This tutorial used the extrude tool a lot and taught us how to use symmetry. It was very cool because it had nice aesthetics and a cool style. It did this by having a nice, low-poly feel, reminding me of games like Star Fox 64. This model taught me how to use the extrude tool more, showing me the abilities of edit poly in general with tools like: extrude, bevel, weld, and connect. It was a fun tutorial and definitely one of my favorites because it showed me how cool a simple cube can be with the tools provided in 3ds Max.

This project was probably the hardest one in this unit because we ad to navigate the entirely new system of UVW maps. UVW maps are textures that you move around and shape to fit on specific parts of a model. They are very important because without them the texture application is random. They are hard to use because it requires knowledge of polys and where things go to a depth that I did not have yet. In all, this was the hardest project, but it was also very important to understand how to use them in the future.

This was my first experience using the  animation feature  in 3ds Max. I was very exited for this project as I got to finally put my skills to the test to make an actual animation. It was hard, but it was also very  rewarding to be able to understand and have the skills to be able to create an animation, and the ability to just know how to use that was very satisfying.  Now, in the future, I have made a few more animations, and I am so happy I was able to have a first experience like I did. All in all, it was a very good first experience for learning how to animate. 

While I am still working on the PBM, I have just finished my artifact 3: lighting. I am very happy with how this came out, and even thought there were quite a few problems, it was all worth it for the amazing lighting job I believe I did. My plan for this was to have an eerie and dark classroom, with some light coming out of the open doorway, which I believe I did well. I used warmer lights for the ceiling lights to get that old feeling, contrasted by the blue light shining in the doorway, which looks like moonlight.  Overall, this lighting looks very visually appealing, and is almost exactly what I wanted.