I got that GAD Room DONE! Finally! (But knock on wood because I'm sure now that I've said this, there will be 5 new problems with it). Most of this week was still removing polys, fixing doorways, and adjusting object pivots, but I was able to move on to modeling some of the upstairs New Building by the end. Fixing doorways actually taught me about boolean objects, something I had somehow never looked into in my almost 4 years of 3Ds Max. Incredibly useful and I definitely should have looked into them earlier. I got the GAD room down to just 536 KB (536,000 bytes), much less than the original 233 MB (233,000,000 bytes), meaning by removing individual objects that can be made from prefabs in Unity, and by taking out all of those polys, the room is about 1/4 of the size it originally was in terms of data. From this whole process from the GAD room, we established that assembling whole rooms in 3Ds Max is a mistake. Instead, make the different assets, and set them around the room in Unity. This way, prefabs could be used, or at least colliders/other object settings can be copied really easily if nothing else. We did run into some issues with textures though, so it is my goal this weekend (today) to fix the keyboard's textures so that we can put that into the game. This keyboard has been the most complicated thing ever, and I'll be happy to have it working, even if it still is in a convoluted way with too many textures. Essentially, we initially had every key as its own object, and they were just all grouped together. That caused a ton of lag, so now a keyboard is just one complex object. However, this makes textures weird since the "box" has a ton of "top surfaces" that like to all be textured the same unless I explicitly go in and texture each of them individually. In the end, this will be worth it since I can just do this once -I already have done this in 3Ds Max but didn't know how to transfer textures to Unity at the time and have since lost the file - and then I can export it as an asset package, and hand it off to Ryan where he can easily copy it. Even though there will be 100 textures (not an exaggeration) it's the best way (currently) to avoid the issue pictured above, and each and every keyboard will reuse those same textures. I won't be surprised if I have to redo all of this again when we inevitably find a more efficient way, but for now, I'm doing what I can. Goals for Next Week
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This August, I broke my arm. More specifically, my wrist on my dominant hand while I was roller skating with some friends and I fell. As someone pursuing animation, you can see where this would cause problems. This was at a really inopportune time for me too because I was planning on creating a comic with over 200 panels by mid September for a contest I had no chance of winning, but that I still wanted to meet the deadline for. That idea was immediately crushed (although I do hope to come back to it once college apps are over and I actually have free time again). Speaking of college apps, I am trying to get into art programs for college, and breaking my arm horrified me because I had just come back from an art intensive and I was ready to make amazing stuff for portfolios. This injury didn't allow me to make much art, and what I did make looked something like this: Just this picture took me almost an hour, I was using a brush stabilizer to make my lines more smooth, and I was really trying just to make something, so I wasn't really employing a lot of design principles. With more time and more planning, I might have been able to make something slightly better, but it would have taken a lot of effort and still not produced work that I was really happy with. So what did I do instead? I took a break. My life became consumed by D&D (which did force me to do a little bit of drawing in terms of making maps and such, but overall, I was not making visual art nearly as much as I normally do.) I could have been working in 3Ds Max a bit more if I wanted to still make art, but I think at that point, I really needed the break. 3D art would just remind me that I couldn't draw 2D art, because at the time, I wanted to do a mixed media project that combines both (which is currently in the works. Stay tuned...) So D&D, world-building and designing my own game, as well as listening to other people's content became my main hobby, and since it was summer and with a broken arm I couldn't do much else, it became most of my life.
And it was great. It took away any feelings of being burnt out and got me excited to create again once I could use my wrist. I listened to The Adventure Zone, a popular D&D actual play podcast and it made me laugh and cry so much, and that really motivated me to keep working on storytelling because it reminded me of how powerful that can really be. I think having this break was tough for me, and did set me back a little while in terms of artistic improvement and assembling a portfolio, but in the end, it's something I've very grateful for because it helped me refocus. Most of this week was removing polys from a recycling bin. Yep. It's all going to be worth it in the end for a less laggy game, but it's very tedious work because even with Ignore Backfacing on, there were times where random parts of the object would be deleted and I would have to go back quite a bit. We're already through the first 1/8th of the school year (Technically 1/7th since the last 1/8th will be taken up by testing) and I don't feel like I've made any new progress towards this game, it's just been fixing stuff from last year, and the most basic preplanning possible. I am very close to having the whole room entirely simplified though. This is just the progress I made this week in terms of file size difference. The first number there was the file size for the original obj of the room. The second is from the obj of the room a week ago. I neglected to export an obj for the room I have now to compare, but what I'm saying is that there is notable progress in terms of reducing file size, which should help the game run much more smoothly.
I know these posts aren't the most exciting, but I think I'm getting close to being back on track, so thanks for bearing with me. Goals for Next Week:
I seem to have a bit of a problem, although I am getting better. (Slowly.)
I am bad at committing to long-term projects. It's not that I don't have ideas for long-term projects, or don't want to do them, it's almost the opposite. I have too many ideas and want to do all of them, meaning none of them ever get finished. This has been an issue I've had for many years and I know it's a pretty common one. Especially with wanting to do animations, I'll often start something, work on it for a little bit, then get a new idea, work on that, and forget about the original one. The cycle continues again and again. This happens even when I have grand plans for something, and I think I've finally figured out why. The first main reason is that I need to study technique a lot more. A lot of times, I would be so close to finishing a sketch, but then I got to the hands and no matter what I did they turned out wonky, and especially a few years ago, that would always drive me away. I've gotten a bit better at trying to face challenges rather than running from them, but if I was to study anatomy more, do more figure drawing, and just practice a bit more, I think I would be able to overcome challenges much more easily, and I wouldn't get frustrated with a project as fast. At the same time though, I'm not going to wait on developing a perfect art style to create bigger projects. Even if my art gets way better later, it's worth it to be working on big projects now to get experience, have fun and make something I'm proud of, and at least capture the idea, even if I want to recreate it better later when I am more skilled. It just means, as I'm doing these projects, I should do exercises to improve too. The second main reason is trying to plan before I've gotten a feeling for the work. I realized this one from my two most successful creative commitments this summer. For me, diving in without a ton of planning and just starting somewhere is incredibly important, at least right now while I'm inexperienced. Creating a calendar schedule for producing an animatic is pointless if I've never tried making an animatic before and have no idea what that time frame should be, or what I actually need to do to accomplish my goals. Instead, it's better to dive in (especially in digital art where there's an undo button), get a feel for what's going on, get excited about what's going on, and to THEN create a schedule. With the two projects I did this with, I actually committed! The first got cut short because of a broken arm making it hard to stick with my schedule, but the second is something that I'm still working on and have made a ton of progress in and I'm loving how it's turning out. It can be hard to commit to one idea when there are so many good ones out there, but it is really worth it to get the outcome that can only come from long periods of hard work. This week was cut short due to hurricane Florence. As far as I know, not much damage was done around here, but school for Thursday and Friday was cancelled just to be safe. So, we only really had Monday through Wednesday, which is not a lot of time to get things done. I said in my last blog post that I hoped that "we are past any last year screw ups and can move on to this year's screw ups!" I should have followed this statement with "knock on wood," because I definitely jinxed it. The GAD Room model is RIDDLED with problems! Pivot points are miles across the screen! There are hundreds of unnecessary polys! There are doors without doorways in the wall! We sure didn't know what we were doing last year. So, that's what this week was. Working on fixing the GAD room, but I'm still not finished with it. It's gonna be a long week. [No picture included because the version of 3Ds Max we use at school is incompatible with the version I am able to get at home (I checked for updates, none available for my free student version) and since the week was cut short I did not get any pictures. Sorry.] Goals For Next Week:
As you can probably tell by the title, I didn't exactly meet my goals for last week, but I think I at least halfway met all of them, and still did make good progress this week. So what were last week's goals? Calender So I did get a very basic bare bones calendar set up in google docs, but, it was definitely too flexible and google docs is not an acceptable program to use for this purpose with our needs. Part of next week will be finding a suitable program and adjusting the calendar to have better defined deadlines, and then getting this out to everyone. Get Floor Plans We learned that we can get a paper map that must stay in Mr. B's room at all times due to security concerns. We were however, unable to get the map due to the owner of them being in a meeting when we swung by. Communication is important, I will email him immediately to figure out when would be a good time to get them. We are hoping and praying that they include measurements, because if not, it's time to measure a whole lot. Model Barebones 2nd Floor Between trying to figure out this map stuff and modelling other stuff that came up, I never got to this. As soon as we have the map and know how much information we still need, doing this will be the top thing on my list to do, but for now it has been moved to lower on my priorities list. "So, Abi, what did you actually do this week?" Well other than the map work describe above, I mostly was catching up with problems from last year. Problem 1: VR Controllers not showing up onscreen Normally in VR, when you're in the game, there's some sort of graphical version of where your hands are if you have controllers in them. If not, it can be very hard to tell what you're doing. For us, no hands or controllers were showing up for the first few days. So I set out to model a hand in 3Ds Max. Hands are hard to draw, but they're actually not too hard to 3D model (granted in a static and not very expressive position, and through a process that took me a couple days, but still.) However, halfway through making this hand, the controllers magically showed up in the interface. Of course. However, it is not a waste at all for two reasons: 1. Modeling experience, especially if I'm going to be working on The Hawk's model, which would most likely require hands (unless we go full bird route). 2. We were planning on having a mechanic where the player can look at their phone, and I can now take the phone model, which was created by the lovely Julia Serrano, and add it to the hand I made in order to make the model we will eventually need. I learned how to model the hand with this tutorial (and the other two in the series). It was very helpful. And Problems 2 + 3: Keyboard and Keyboards Last year when we made the GAD demo room, one of the objects I spent a ton of time on was a keyboard. At first when I made it, every key, and every letter on every key, were their own objects. This is obviously a problem because Unity can't possible load all of that and not be incredibly laggy. Somehow last year this problem was not so obvious to me. Eventually though, someone pointed it out, and I made a simplified version where symbols on keys were all textures, and the keyboard was one solid object. However, despite this there were still two problems, which I had to fix this week. 1. The "simplified keyboard" had some screw up when I merged all of those pieces and had a pivot about 1000 units away from the keyboard. This means that any rotation or scaling was completely screwed up. This was a quick fix of moving the pivot, and I'm glad I had this experience because now it's the simplest thing in the world to do if I every run into this problem again. 2. The original "Completed GAD Room" file that we had still included all of those lag-inducing keyboards. I just had to go through and delete all of them, which didn't take as long as I thought it would. So, I am hoping we are past any last year screw ups and can move on to this year's screw ups!
Goals for next week:
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AuthorHi, I'm Abi, a DSA student who likes games, drawing, writing, and acting. Archives
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