FMP: Week no. I-don't-even-know-anymore-the-world-is-ending

How much can possibly change in mere few weeks? The Universe has been testing the limits of the answer to this question vigorously this year. Since my last post, I got the incredibly surreal news of being offered a Character Art internship position at Riot Games for Summer 2020 - I felt like the happiest person on Earth, Riot has been a company I wanted to work for since I knew what Game Art was, maybe even earlier, as I remember being wow-ed by the art in their game, League of Legends, ever since I started playing it in my early teens.

Since my last post, however, the whole world has changed too, drastically, so much so that the current situation is frequently being compared to WWII by news and media. If someone reads this years after it has been published, I am talking about the Covid-19 pandemic - travel bans, face masks, lockdowns, fears for the lives of our loved ones, all of these set to undoubtedly change everyone's immediate and maybe even long-term futures. I do not want to sound like I am complaining. I am very aware that I still have it way better than many, many people in more difficult circumstances and I am grateful for that fact every day, but we have been advised by our tutors to list all issues affecting out Final Major Project and hand-ins on our blog so they can be taken into consideration during our evaluation. This is how it affected me:
-  Moving countries and moving from quarantine back home: I've lost about a week by having to sort out moving from the UK back to Czech Republic (only the journey took close to 2 full days by bus and a car, as my previously booked flights were cancelled). I will undoubtedly lose even more time as I have to sort out bringing all my possessions from UK back home (I had to use emergency travel and there was no time to pack and move all the things prior to me leaving the UK). I also had to set up my workplace in the place of my compulsory quarantine (14 days for everyone who arrives to Czech Republic from one of the risk countries, e.g. UK) and then move back home and set up my workplace once more, when the quarantine was over.
- Internet: The place of my compulsory quarantine unfortunately had extremely bad connection to the internet, with upload speeds ranging from 0.00 mb/s to 0.02 mb/s on a very good day :D I am therefore uploading my ZBrush files for evaluation with a delay (previously agreed upon with tutors).
- Hardware issues: As if all that wasn't enough, during my first week of quarantine, I found out my Wacom pen stopped connecting to my Wacom. With all non-essential shops closed in Czechia, I could not buy a replacement. Without the pen I was unable to use ZBrush effectively, but tried to work in 3Ds max on whatever was possible. Fortunately, after a few days, my mom managed to find a spare pen I kept in my room for when I travel home and then brought it to my quarantine-place, and that resolved the issue. Unfortunately, this was not the only hardware issue I've been experiencing. You see, my laptop is a certified grandpa, and though it can handle persistent usage on occassion, using it every day for Zbrush, 3dsMax, Photoshop and PureRef at the same time proved to be a pain in the ass for lack of a better term. An average saving time in ZBrush was 3 minutes per autosave, an average number of stroke lags in Photoshop was 10 per hour, and don't even get me started about the error messages and shutdowns :) This here is turning into a boring wall of text, so allow me to illustrate:

And I did not even take screenshots of the 3dsMax errors because I was too busy trying to emergency save and look for a working Autoback :D  This soundbite was my mental state on a daily: 

- Productivity issues: Not gonna sugarcoat this, but the state of a global pandemic and the whole shabang that comes with it kiiiiind of messed my brain up. Prior to all this, I had a fairly effective routine, I managed to produce a lot of work on a daily and I even managed to balance it out so I could take care of myself through exercise and yoga, frequently. The complete change of environment and having to deal with numerous additional issues (looking at you, my accommodation provider refusing to refund money for the rent and electricity I paid a year in advance - without using a maintenace loan - but obviously cannot use up) made it very hard to get back into that routine. But. I'm on my way to getting there, I'll show how it's going in my next post. 

For some positives, if anyone hasn't seen this yet, please do (and subscribe) - if you're feeling shit, there's a huge chance it will make you feel better (and thanks to Jordan for letting me know this exists :)

Also, just so this qualifies as an art update post as well, here's two concepts I made based on great prompts by @raspbearyart, shared by Jordan (thank you again! And check out his concepts based on the prompts too!):