Final Submission - Black Motorcycles, The Last Suprematist Sculpture

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After 13 long weeks working on ‘The Last Suprematist Sculpture’ group project we have finally completed what we set out to do. As a group we constructed a brief outlining our aims, challenges and outcomes to develop a vector copy of Russel’s sketch of a Honda CB750 combined with a photo realistic vector illustration of a MV Augusta.

We were to utilise 2 styles in our collage, one was to replicate Russel’s sketch and the other was to take on a more photo realistic look for the front half. Our group was thrown in the deep end on this project as it largely utilised Adobe Illustrator which none of us had used before. This project was one that I wanted to work on from the beginning and I’m glad that I got to be a part of it. I spent a lot of time helping my group members understand the tasked needed for completion as well as helping them understand the programs which put extra pressure on me as I also had my own sections of work as well as all the presentations. But all came through in the end despite multiple setbacks.

Group Objectives and Goals

As one of the groups doing ‘The Last Suprematist Sculpture’, we developed a brief which outlined all our objectives and goals to clarify the key aspects of this project. Our mission was to develop and construct a vectored collage specifically to the image Russel supplied us at the beginning of the term. This Collage had to be exactly the same as the image that was given down to its imperfections. 

Individual Milestone

This project is based around the premise of working in a group and collaborating with others. Earlier in the semester we each assigned ourselves individual goals to achieve by the completion of the project, these were our Individual Major Milestones. The Milestones are representative of the goals that I aspired to fulfil over the semester

-        Professional Illustrator Design

With my business outside of Architecture, the Illustrator program was one that I had heard of many times for graphic design work although I had never really researched it or played with it. But now through this assignment this semester I have developed a sound understanding of taking photos and turning them into realistic vectored images using a range of different tools and techniques. I am very pleased with my work and how it turned out. I feel like I accomplished my goal and now can utilise this skill in my business and further assignments.   

-        Professional Documentation

I set this as one of my milestones as I have a business based around visually documenting events and moments. I have been doing Photography and Video for 5 years now and felt that I could benefit my team by documenting our weekly progress through photos and videos as well as creating visually captivating and effective videos to assist in our presentations. I wanted to give our group an edge when it came to our presentations and wiki. I believe that a visually captivating video can greatly assist presentations, keep people’s attention and engage viewers. This was one unique skill that I could use to benefit out team. I believe that I achieved this goal this semester.

Wiki Developement

Being one of the major parts of the assignment, ‘manage and maintain a wiki to document your team’s progress throughout the semester’, this was an important aspect of the assignment. Having an easy to navigate and visually pleasing wiki was what I was aiming for as people visiting will more likely stay longer or enjoy their time on the page. As the wiki is a big part of the assignment, it was a must to have everything up to date and easy to find. Weekly updates were to be made to show our groups progress, this included photos and videos accompanied by text detailing what went on during the week and how we progressed. When delegating tasks to team members, I volunteered to be in charge of the wiki development. This included making sure that everything was up to date and presentable. 

I customised the standard wiki layout and changed some of the HTML coding to make the page more visually pleasing. I also created a banner as well as positioning the navigation menu and text in an easy to read manner.

I designed the wiki to be as user friendly as possible, with everything being laid out simply and clearly. 

The page is easy to navigate through. There are main headings, once inside those headings, it branches off into the different sub headings/ topics.

Information is displayed clearly and neatly. Pictures and videos have descriptions to make it easier to understand. 

Presentation Development

Presentations are an important way of letting others knows your ideas and plans. Creating a visually pleasing presentation with relevant information and images that flow and engage the audience is crucial to getting your ideas across or in this case a good mark. When developing my team’s presentation, I try to do these things. From watching other presentations, I have tried to learn from others and do things differently in order to be more successful. For instance, some presentations have been quite plane and uninteresting. I try to have an engaging presentation by having it flow nicely with simple animations, colours, images and backgrounds as well as videos to help captivate the audience. I try to make the presentations more visual rather than textural, as other presentations have too much information and drag on way to long.  

-        Dedicated and Helpful Team Leader

This project turned out to be quite challenging when leading my team. I needed a lot of patience for my group as I had to explain almost everything a number of times before they would somewhat understand the direction we were heading. I have never really been a team leader myself before, unless it is my own project where it’s my vision, I like to sit back and let other people make the decisions. I’m not one for arguing my point within a group unless I’m the director. I’m a fan of the saying “to many cooks spoil the broth’. But in this case I was appointed automatically.
When my group needed help or information I tried my best to help and as quickly as I could. I tried to help by taking on the more challenging jobs as to create less confusion for my team. This helped them complete their tasks but left me with more to do.

This role was defiantly the most challenging and more frustrating ones, but I overcame it and It has defiantly given me more experience in running a team for my future tasks.

What have I Achieved?

Form the work that I did for my group and the quality of each I believe I did achieve my Major milestone. From working within a group for 3 ½ months, I have learnt a lot more about working within a team. In the past, group assessment only last for a few weeks or a month, proving harder than anything I have done before. When working within a team on an assignment that you all know nothing about is quite challenging. You really need to plan, listen to one another and communicate. Because everyone has different priorities and lives, things won’t always be done or go according to plan. This project has defiantly taught me that working in a group requires a lot more than just delegating tasks then everyone segregates, doing their own individual sections. It requires at lot more collaboration and closely working together to achieve goals.

This project has defiantly changed my approach to working within a team and on future projects. I know now to communicate and stay on track with the group. Research is the key to learning new things as well as planning and preparation. The use of communication is a must as well as finding team members strengths and weaknesses and using them to your advantage. I have learnt that working within a team there will always be some form of conflict, whether it is severe or something minor. From researching and doing a presentation on the subject, I believe I could effectively deal with a situation if I was ever to be put in a situation again.

If I were to start this assignment again, I would create a strong work ethic to work to over the duration of the assignment. I would dedicate more time to research, as we had little knowledge on what types of Illustrator tools and techniques could better aid our image. I would also ask people for help, advice or tips which would help speed up the research and give us better knowledge from an experienced source.

Conclusion

Working on this project over the past 3 ½ months has given me not only team building skills, but skills in how to take on daunting tasks with a group that you know little about and achieve a result that you didn't think possible. Our group achieved a lot in the amount of time we were given. Although what we did produce was limited to the quality of the original image, a much more detailed and clearer image would have resulted in a much better product. But all in all, we achieved our goals of creating ‘The Last Suprematist Sculpture’ utilising illustrator and 123D catch and are all very happy with the end result.

Final Presentation - Groups Critique

Last Suprematist

Andrew & Marina

• A lot of pain staking hours went into creating a photo realistic finish using the mesh tool

• Not happy with the finished product, the contrast between gradient and pen tool was not how they wanted it.

Vedran & Sally                                                                                           

• Through their use of the mesh tool, they were able to create a realistic representation of Russell’s collage.  

• Through using the Pen tool, the work was really time consuming and tedious.

Josh & Henderson

• They found toggling off the source image to be quite encouraging and pleasing as it would show their progress and likeness to the original image.   

• The exhaust and pipes took far too long using pen tool, this became a setback as they lost crucial time to complete other parts.

Aerial Ropeway

Paul, Roschelle, Shaun, Eugelyn, Jesharelah

• The Animated falling towers were amazing; the detailed crisis levels were also really well done.

• The group had lots of problems with programs;  and lots of errors with rope animations causing them to scrap the whole idea.

Matt, Daisy, Iqra, Yen, Bethany, Maria

• The group was really pleased with the functioning animated rubble buckets within the Crysis level.

• They encountered problems with animations caused by crisis (glitches)

Bus Stop

Martha, Anthony, Kerre, Darren, Daniel, Jason, George, Rue, Michael, Kangyi

• The groups final work was really well presented and very professional

• The display was very informative with lots of models, diagrams and posters detailing the group’s progress.

• The group had problems with the project objective which changed mid-way through the semester creating frustrations and difficulties.

Gothic Architecture

Ricky, Dorothy, Maki, Stefan, David, Alan

• They did a great job of creating a functioning and aesthetically pleasing church using the program Unity.

• The group found it difficult to follow the tutorials as the keys didn’t have a description to help explain further.  

Anthony, Yaoyu, Lauren, Bassel, Ben, Xiaodong

• The group was most pleased with the navigation within their interactive interface, it is really well done.

• They had some trouble importing custom terrains and textures into Unity which caused frustrations and difficulties.  

Week 11/12 - Weekly Progress

In the lead up to our final presentation my group and I became frantic and stressed as we just started implementing a new technique to our Illustrator image. This technique using ‘The Mesh Tool’ would allow you to place lots of points within a shape and then change the colour of those points to give a vectored gradient between colours.

We changed to this technique as we realised that you couldn’t ‘Blur’ or ‘Feather’ vectored layers without them pixelating.

This new process was much more difficult as certain shapes could create weird results and the more complex the object, the messier it became as there were too many lines.  

We then realised that only certain parts were suitable for the mesh tool technique and others were better suited to the pen tool technique.

This gave us a better direction and cleared a lot of problems up, also speeding up the process.

The final days saw a few problems, with group member’s work not being detailed enough or incorrect. This led to further changed on their behalf as well as problems with late submissions.

Prior to week 11 we were having lots of problems with our 123D Catch model. We then managed to get a great capture using the Red Centre labs. 

At the end of week 12, Molly took our 123D catch model and cleaned it up using 3DS Max, also lowering the poly count. She then combined the capture of the Honda CB750 given to us at the beginning of the semester and combined the two creating a 3D model of our Illustrator image.