Unit 80 Work experience (MoD 2019)
Aim
This unit provides you with an opportunity to apply their knowledge, skills and understanding in the workplace and gain credit for working in a relevant area of the creative media sector.
Unit abstract
This unit is designed to develop your abilities to identify appropriate work placement opportunities in the creative media sector and explore the process of securing such placements.
Learners will develop both vocational and transferable skills within a practical industrial context.
Monitoring and evaluating the learner’s performance and learning experience is integral to this unit.
Learning outcomes
On successful completion of this unit a learner will:
Be able to identify and negotiate work experience placements in the creative media sector
Understand the requirements of negotiated work placements
Be able to undertake work experience placements as negotiated
Be able to monitor and evaluate own performance and learning during work placements in the creative media sector.
Phase 1: The Brief
Our work experience assignment has us recreating a Range Finder for the MoD (Ministry of Defence). We're in a team of 6 people and have assigned people to different parts of the model to create. I originally had planned on working on the curved handles on the side of the rangefinder. I decided not to because I didn't have sufficient reference images to accurately recreate it. Instead I've been tasked with writing up the notes and updates for other members of the team to work off of.
I have enjoyed the early stage of the pre-production phase and have learned a lot about VR and its application within the MOD and within the Gaming community/industry.
I need to put more work into the technical aspects of setting up a scene in VR using both Unity and Unreal as it was not as straightforward as I had hoped. There are some set up issues that I had to overcome to get things working and also permissions were needed from outside organisation including IT services. One of our limitations involved the ability to collaborate in the Unity Engine due to network settings that the college used, preventing pier to pier connectivity.
It was good to be able to ask my peers about what they were doing and how they had solved problems. I found this cut down on the time it took to get it all set up.
Phase 2: Research
We had been given a handful of reference images to work off of and we allocated different parts to different people. At the end we had one person assemble the model by grabbing all the separate files and putting them into one scene and resizing them to fit together. This model was both to be used as a training example to used when teaching soldiers how to operate the equipment, not only in a virtual environment but also in a physical environment with the use of 3D printing technology. Allowing the client to have a physical copy of the digital model we created. This is a method that is used a lot in the industry nowadays in order to demonstrate a concept or to understand the scale for a product or to get an idea of the sort of quality the client would be getting.
In regards to the VR stage, the MoD is using this technology to train people to operate different equipment and to anticipate simulated encounters in a safe way to prepare soldiers for a real scenario. This has been done for both flight simulators and for military communication protocols.
We calculated that the average hourly rate for a 3D modeller was approximately $40 or £30.78, for this particular project we spent about 75 hours creating this model and making it suitable for the MoD to use for their training exercises. Based on 3D modellers working on this particular project would earn approximately £2,250. Although that is purely based on an average estimate. Because the hourly rate can go anywhere between £20-£60 for industry standard 3D Modellers. If we used the higher estimates we could get anywhere between £3,000 and £6,000 for the entire project. This is pretty standard for 3D modellers in the industry, let alone Government contracted designers.
For the role of a Producer in a team like this the annual salary would approximate to about £72,798, again not taking into account the potential perks of being contracted by the government.
The process of building our team allowed us to evaluate's skills set and to see where people best fit within our structure. The reason for this was because we looked at this project as an opportunity to form an actual studio team, people that could work well together and fit together naturally. We called the team Strafe Studios and we've continued to work together since we first formed and have been expanding our slowing to allow for other passionate people that we know to get involved.
My main role within the team is as QA Manager and have helped keep tabs on the progress and development of different assets for the project. This was an arduous process because it involved topology checks for the different components of each model and poly count for the model to ensure that the model is well optimised and can be used in simulations without excessive render times. In addition to this I was able unwrap the UV maps to allow for clean texture work, otherwise the textures would have appeared stretched or distorted on the different faces.
The one issue I had with the project was the lack of reference images and believe that if I had to participate in the project again I would have asked for more reference images or even a video displaying all sides of the model and demonstrating what different parts of the device do for use when developing the model. Saying that however we were instructed to make the model slightly different from actual device for security reasons. Because if someone who was unauthorised got a hold of the device and then had our model to view then they'd be able to operate the device.
This was both a blessing and a curse. Because it meant that we had the freedom to design elements of the device but at the same time we had no reference to base the design off of.
We completed the final version of the rangefinder on the 13th March 2019 and we handed the finished model to the MoD. which they were really impressed with.
