Assessment & Brief

The Brief
Design and construct in Zbrush a simple Biped character/creature concept for preproduction use in Games, Animation and/or Film. Your design and workflows should take into account industry standards in the construction of digital models.

You may start the sculpt of your model only after your final design has been submitted for assessment and approval in Week 3 and added to your module blog. 

Week3 Submission Tuesday 04th February.

Your development work submission in Week 3 should contain:

• Character Research (at least 3 x A4 sheets of research material influencing your design)
• 5 x character sheets of developmental character design (at least 2 of sheets should be of your final design and show character poses, expressions and colour studies.)
• 2 x Character Model Reference Drawings in the T pose in the front and side views.

All your research and design work should be digitized and uploaded to your blog for assessment in Week 3. The 2 final character design sheets should contain poses and expressions relevant to your character and an indication of colour and textures to be used.

Final Submission Via Blackboard Monday 4th May

Assessment Items

1. Zbrush Project containing the final character/creature scene and textures.
2. 3 High quality rendered images of your model.
3. Annotated blog containing regular weekly posts, reflecting on the process of your model build and documenting your insights, research, and character design progression. 

N.B. The Journal blog should contain your research, designs and development work. Recording your progress regularly, at each stage of the project and should be accompanied by a 1000 word, reflective learning report as your final post. 

You will be assessed not just on the quality of your Zbrush sculpting, research and character design work but also on the content and quality of your blog. Ask yourself these questions:

1. Is my blog well annotated so that someone not familiar with my work can understand and follow my process?
2. Am I making regular posts (at least once a week)? 
3. Am I reflecting on my process and documenting my insights, successes, failures and feelings as I progress through this module?

Learning Outcomes
On successful completion of the module, students should be able to: 

1. Define the processes and pipelines where digital sculpting is an integrated part of the production. 
2. Evaluate and adopt correct processes to develop and realize a design in digital sculpting. 
3. Use correct software, terminologies, conventions, and workflows in the synthesis of their designs. 
4. Evaluate their artifacts against current industry standards and expectations. 

Assessment Criteria

There is one summative assessment item – based on the brief – failure submit will jeopardize both your right to re-assessment and your ability to graduate in 2021.

Assessment Criteria are descriptions of grades that apply to particular levels of achievement. They are intended to make more explicit the grades that are achieved at the end of each project. The assessed learning which you may achieve on the course can be classified under three main areas.

1. Subject-specific knowledge: understanding, attributes, skills

• Generating and selecting ideas
• Investigation, inquiry, and visualization
• Process and/or concept development

2. Generic Knowledge and understanding, attributes and skills.

• Research and analysis of information, contextualization and critical thinking.

The descriptions within these domains identify different levels of achievement. These levels progress from a basic competence (surface learning) to a mature competence (deep learning). These levels should enable you to understand what each grade means and what you need to do in order to improve your grades. It is intended that there is a uniformity of progression in the descriptions from a surface learning approach to a deep learning approach.

Full grade descriptors are available via VLE (virtual learning environment, eg Blackboard/Google Site).

A surface approach to learning is essentially learning by rote. It depends on memory rather than understanding and it can only usually be reapplied in a situation identical to the one initially encountered. Surface learning does not last.

A deep approach to learning, on the other hand, leads to understanding, to the ability to determine interrelationships and to apply underlying principles. This implies a capacity to transfer thinking and performance to other situations. Deep learning is long-lasting.