MCD4730 – Foundations of 3D Documentation Guide Supporting documentation is an important part for many IT projects, providing colleagues, clients and assessors a behind the scenes look of how the final product came to completion. The documentation component of the MCD4730 assignments provide you the opportunity to showcase your planning, decisions, problems, solutions, and your workflow. If you are unsure how to go about doing effective documentation for your assignment here are several guiding points to help you along. Documentation Tips: – Formatting is important The documentation partially exists to assess your professional writing skills, so it is important to put effort into making the documentation clear and readable. Make sure your documentation includes the following: o Title Page o Table of contents o Well defined sections per topic (variable based on Assignment) o Appropriate referencing when taking images from the internet. o Correct grammar/spelling. – Don’t miss anything Your assignments include a lot more than just modelling your objects. They can generally be broken down into several topics such as research, planning, modelling, lighting, texturing, and building. These topics may change based on the Assignment. Don’t over emphasise one phase of the project and leave out other major components of the project. – Include pictures You do not need to be overly wordy to get your point across. Often an image does a good job of showing and explaining things, so consider using simple labelled images to describe your process, rather than using huge paragraphs. When including
images, crop your images to focus on something, rather than including all the Maya/OS interface. – Document your mistakes You will very rarely create a perfect model on your first attempt. The early phase of your assignments should include planning and experimentation, and inevitably, failure. When you fail to do something, document it and explain how you ended up fixing it. This is important for showing your improvement from beginning to end. Documentation Instructions: To complete your documentation for all 3 Assignments, you will need to create a Google Doc file and share it with your teacher. You will need to progress your documentation throughout the Assignment period, and your teacher will regularly check it. You will receive a penalty if you fail to progress on your documentation regularly. Specifics on the penalty amount can be found in the Assignment brief. Step 1: Starting from the my.monash homepage, click on the “Google Drive” link. Step 2: Rick-click on the blank white area in your drive and make a ‘New folder’ called “Your Name MCD4730 Assignment Folder”. Step 3: Once you have created a new folder, right click once again and this time click on ‘Google Docs’. Name this document “Your Name MCD4730 Assignment Number” Step 4: Look to the top-right corner of the screen and press the ‘Share’ button. Step 5: In the highlighted section below, enter your teacher’s email address. Step 6: When you are ready to submit your documentation, you should download the document as a PDF, and add it to your submission before uploading it to Moodle.