Alan Mealor is a lead artist at Lucid Games. He started out as a Junior and worked his way up, having been in the industry for 16 years. He mainly focuses on environment art as his job. He gave a lot of facts about the game industry and it's growth over the past few years, saying that in 2016 the video game market was worth around $99.6 billion worldwide and 3.8 billion in the UK alone. He also mentioned that within the UK there are around 2000 video game companies, with 250 at studio size.

Mealor then went on to talk about what he felt was currently driving the games industry, with his first point being middleware such as Unreal 4 and Substance Painter that help cut down the length of time it takes to make things like texture sheets and also help to make them procedural, allowing more re-use and easier redesigning if needed. Another thing he considers to be having a huge effect is the pipeline of work within companies has matured, with reduced cost, larger teams and the ability to prototype game ideas faster.

Mealor also gave some information on Substance Painter; what it is and how to use it.

Finally he gave his advice on how to get a job in the industry:

• On your Portfolio, less is more.
• Take out the lower quality work, keep it looking nice.
• Play to your strengths, it's easier to switch job later than get one first.
• Tailor your submissions to the company you're applying to.
• Show more than just renders, include things like wireframes and UVs.
• Show that you can make something from the real world, not just a fantasy item. It shows a good eye for detail.
• Put time and effort into each render, don't just take a screen shot and move on.
• Use things like Art station, CG society and Polycount to get honest feedback on work and improve it.
• Try to make something different and avoid cliches.
• Knowledge of software helps but it's more important to know things like the rules of animation; things they can't teach at the company.
• Not neccesary to make your own model for animating, using your own might bring down the rest of the work if it doesn't look good enough.

Works as both an artist and illustrator. Wen to an art school in Romania; the school was dismissive of contemporary art. She spent 5 days a week doing life drawing, trying different styles and ideas, while keeping the same subject matter present and clear. She works from home as an illustrator and has used crowd funding to fund a project.

Simon Amor works in the idustry as a Designer, alongside people in other creative fields. He works for a company that collects data such as cookies for websites, to allow the websites to better suggest things to you. His team has access to most areas of the company He stated that there are lots of types of designers and that he doesn't see himself as a designer, but rather a problem solver.
He gave some advice about doing well in the industry:

• You need to set yourself a goal; decide what it is you want to do, and then start to narrow down what that is further. 
• Need a portfolio. Fill it with relevant work for the job you want. Around 6 pieces of work, including the process of creating it, not just the final result.
• Never work for free. The second you do, it devalues your work, unless you are doing it as work experience.
• Moving somewhere for work is an investment of both money and time.
• Better to call or arrive in person to try to find work experience, as they don't have time to answer every email.
• Start doing work/Looking for work now.
• It's fine if your idea doen't pay off as long as you work hard to show the process you followed before deciding it wasn't going to work.
• Have multiple projects going at once so that you can switch to the other one if works start slowing on the current one.
• Side projects should be fun.
• He works on a problem until it's fixed rather than come back later.
• Learn to code on some level.
• Networking is helpful but not always necessary.

The first talk on Monday was a panel session by Tamara Harvey of Theatr Clwyd, Alfredo Cramerotti of Mostyn, Gareth Jones of Welsh ICE, Jo Marsh of Oriel Wrexham and Andy Cheetham of Cheetham Bell. The panel was chaired by Mike Corcoran and was on the subject of Collaboration in the Creative Industries.
They each explained who they were and how they got where they are now.
Tamara Harvey arrived at Theatr Clwyd 3 months ago, having worked freelance in any part of the field she could and had to figure out how to handle funding cuts to the company as soon as she did. She talked about the different shows that they have made recently and about one of her ideas to let members of the public come and see behind the scenes as to how the plays are made.

Jo Marsh then told everyone about the new things going on with Oriel Wrexham, telling us that they are moving in to a new space in Wrexham soon and showing us the floor plan and images of how the finished building might look. She also enthused that there are lots of opportunities for students within Oriel Wrexham and lots spaces in which to work.

​Next was Andy Cheetam, who gave his advice on how he first got into the creative industry and how he got to where he is today. He started by making an advert for a fish and chip shop which won many awards; spawning an award category of it's own, and now helps with the marketting for many different companies. He came up with the idea of the 'Can tracker' for John Lewis, that allowed people to see exactly where the product they have bought has come from.

The talk ended with each of them giving helpful advice about the industry and specifically working within a team. Below is a bullet point list of the advice given.​

• If an idea is precious to you make sure an NDA (Non-disclosure agreement) is signed first.
• It helps to know both the strengths and weaknesses of everyone on the team you are working with.
• It helps to talk to the people you are working with face to face rather than via Email.
• It's good to share your idea and listen to the feedback rather than keep it to yourself forever.
• There needs to be at least one designated leader of a project.
• Sometimes it's important to say no to collaboration, if you don't think it would be good for the project or the other person is not going to be good for it.
• It can be good to be frank with people; be honest.
• Make sure the collab. is time efficient for the work you want to create.
• Make sure you get feedback from people who will critically assess your work rather than tell you it's good to spare your feelings.
• Part-time jobs help tide you over while you look for the work you want to do.

I Have made lots of progress on the assets for my game and have made a sectioned off piece of map to walk around in and test how everything looks and works in-game. So far I am very happy with it and feel that these assets and textures will definitely be suitable to use in the full game.

I started by looking at the textures I had imported already and how they looked and decided that they looked both too shiny and that the normal maps needed to be more intense than they were; so I decided to look up, firstly, why that might be, and then how to fix the problem.

The solution I found to the low effect normal maps was as shown above. Before connecting the map to the material it's red and blue connectors are multiplied by whatever value I input into 'NormalIntensity' and then it is filtered back together before being applied to the material.
The solution I found to the textures seeming too shiny was based around the actual textures themselves.

I have now created and applied textures to all of the modular building parts and have tested whether I will be able to use them to create different building layouts to be used in the game. It took a few attempts as I had trouble setting the pivot points for each object in a location which would allow me to easily place the different parts within an Actor class in Unreal, however I believe I have successfully done so now and will be able to use these .FBX files for the final thing. My next task will now be to create some different variants for each texture to help with disguising repetition and then I can move on to the rigging and animating of the character.

Today I continued creating the textures for the other assets I have made, combining some when needed. I also moved them into Unreal to see how they looked and make sure they worked correctly.

I have been following tutorials on ways to combine the different texture sheets I have made in Substance Painter into one material to save memory while rendering the character. The process I have followed was to export the different texture sheets from Substance Painter in PNG format and then import them into Substance Designer. I then dragged these different PNGs from the explorer into the graph and hooked up the different inputs into one base material, after applying a greyscale to certain inputs such as Metallic.

After doing this for all the different textures I used a material blend node, and a 'rgb-a_split' that separates the alpha channel, to combine the different texture sheets into one, with the end blend feeding into the output nodes and allowing me to export it all as one large, combined texture instead of the four original ones.

EDIT: I also tested the exported textures in Unreal 4 to make sure that export would function correctly and everything works perfectly, I will definitely be able to use this method for all of my assets to save memory for my game.

Progress on modelling my character for my game is coming along nicely. I have UV unwrapped the whole character and have been testing different basic textures on the model, to see whether the space each section has available is reasonable, as shown above. I think it looks good and will be up to the standard I'm hoping for with just a little more time spent on the textures and a larger texture file used once exported. Problems I noticed and fixed during this process have included:

• Inverted normals on certain mirrored body sections.
• Overlapping UVs that weren't supposed to share texture.
• Hidden faces inside the model from when mirrored that didn't need to be there.

I'm not sure whether I'm going to go into much detail with the textures for this character and I think my current plan is to not expend the time trying to create a face texture and simply leave it blank for now, as I would like to progress on to the animation stage as fast as possible to make sure I'm able to make as many animations as I would like to.

Before I started UV unwrapping the model I did a few rigging tests and uploaded the model to Mixamo to see how well the model would move if rigged by the website.

I uploaded the model with the bottom part of the dressing gown disabled, as it would likely not be rigged correctly by the websites algorithm, and the model appears to move as intended with few visible issues. I will need to rig the hands and dressing gown separately myself, however I believe I should be able to use this software as a good starting point to save time on my project.