Reflective Essay!
At the beginning moving blocks and sizing them to my liking proved harder than anticipated. I thought i should start with simple buildings with mostly square edges and not a lot of complex shapes. On the first image i was simply trying to recreate a photo of a basic building with simple infrastructure. As time went on i realized how to more efficiently use duplicate and place objects using all 4 panels.
I had some ideas at the beginning; apparently hard ones. Most would have involved more than 500 placed blocks or more looking back and after realizing how long 50 took i had to change my game plan immediately. My best one was the bridge photo, i realized i only needed to make one of the pillars on the bridge because i could then duplicate it over to the other side. As time went on i had to keep telling myself to use brain not brawn. I got too simple minded with wanting to create individual elements every time instead of saving time and duplicating.
I decided the scene was finished when i felt the blocks represented the buildings in the photos. I am sure if i went back one week from now they would look completely different. I also realized i have a bad habit of making all the blocks too large when i should really scale them down more. All in all i really enjoyed myself and thought this learning process was fun. I think in the future i will be able to use my time much more efficiently to be more productive. I can see why game designers take short cuts that then create glitches later on. Time is valuable and you don't always want to spend 5 hours making sure all the rocks look right, its important to work swiftly and effectively.
