What is your 3D “comfort zone?” How do you hope to expand it over this academic year?

When thinking about my 3D comfort zone, the first thing that comes to mind is environment art and materials.
I have said before on my going forward post I believe about how I see the way I work as "lazy perfectionism", however I think that has been challenged as I have found more productivity as of late and a want to be in labs - maybe I just saw it that way because of Covid last year.
I would now consider myself as just someone who loves to avoid tedium; I got frustrated with the projects last year when having to hand paint textures over programs like Painter and Designer, or even just having to use a non PBR workflow, as the results never turned out how I wanted them to look even when I dedicated a lot of time to them
I spent a lot of time over the summer on my shader house project, where I created some shaders for both toon outlines and Cel shading that were effective ways at pushing a style, especially because I avoided using PBR for the room to keep the textures looking flat

Where do I see myself this year?

My main goal for this year is to produce many portfolio pieces that I can be proud of. After hearing the outline for the projects I am very excited to attempt them, even the creature project which I was originally sceptical of because I am a bit haunted from characters last year.
I aim to focus mostly on the environment art and in engine technical side of game art, potentially learning some primitive coding to develop more complex shaders and tools within unreal.
I also hope to create a environment project in Rising Star this year, as I think giving myself some free reign to create whatever I want will help me hone my artistic eye into what makes a project successful, and I believe that because the timing of it is so spread out (early November until February) I can very easily plug away in my spare time at weekends or in evenings when I feel like it.
I can see myself leaving the traditional photoshop texturing in the dust now also in favour of wonderful PBR procedural texturing, since it just looks better and is a lot faster at creating the results I hoped for.