This week was pretty simple. It was just getting the second floor walls to Ryan, and so far they look awesome! I still have to subtract a lot of doorways and window holes, but I have about half of the floor done. Then, it will just be a matter of making the assets to fill the rooms. The textures and lighting Ryan has been adding has been making everything look really great. I'm really excited to see how the rest of the room turns out. I also have my meeting with Mr. B to do a progress check on what progress I have made towards this project, so that should be interesting. Goals for This Week:
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If you've read ANY of my Advanced Studies Progress Posts, you probably know how many times I've had to redo work from last year that was not working in the game. Some of it looked bad, some of it needed to be simplified, and some of it was just acting weird in Unity so I had to at least re-export the file. Of course, there is some frustration in it, but there's also a chance to improve, and I kind of love that, so as portfolio deadlines for colleges rapidly approach, I'm taking the redo approach to some of my art as well. This idea was mostly spurred by going to the Nasher Museum portfolio day and realizing, Hey, I can do better now, but this idea is still really cute. One of the critiques I got on this piece was that there was a lot of empty space, so in redrawing it, I wanted to make the composition a bit more interesting, so I brought the figures closer, and plan to add more details in the empty spaces. Another comment was that Bigfoot's pose could be more interesting, so I am following his suggestion on making the positioning a little more interesting. So far I have also opted to make the trees a little more stylistic so that they're both more interesting to look at and lead the focus to the figures.
I think in general I should continue to redraw art as I improve. It allows me to see my progress, repolish old ideas, and get cool new art out of it too. A lot of the time, when I'm simplifying the amount of vertices and polys an object has, that object starts having issues with shading. After simplifying so many object though, I've started to realize the pattern of when it happens, and I made a little diagram that helps explain it. (If you're colorblind, it's probably useless to you, sorry.) Basically, getting rid of vertices still attached to an edge that you have not gotten rid of is risky business. Even just getting rid of vertices that line up with other vertices where there COULD be an edge but there isn't has given me issues before. Basically, not freaking out immediately over bad shading, and instead continuing to simplify the object might be your best bet on solving this problem, because once all parts are simplified the same, it usually goes away.
Of course, it doesn't always work, especially with more complex objects, but it's good to know not to freak out immediately if the shading gets funky in the process. This week was a continuation on revamping the GAD room, and also beginning to work on simplifying an enemy chicken model, modeled by Julia. I actually got a lot done this week, especially considering that I missed class on Wednesday. However, at the end of this upcoming week, we have a progress check so I do need to make sure that the GAD room is done (or close enough) so that we're ready for that. I started off by finishing subtracting the doorways and windows from the walls. I ran into a problem when I tried to export though because some of the vertices were problematic. However, switching from an .obj to a .fbx file easily solved this problem. There were a couple other issues with the pivots of some of the door frames, but Ryan was kind enough to fix this in Unity. I fixed a couple other pivot points for some assets as well, and then I took a break from the GAD room. Julia had just finished the chicken model, so I went about simplifying it. For the most part, it is much simpler than I would have guessed. However, there are quite a few tail feathers that I'm going to really try to remove some polys on. I got the feet of the chicken simplified this week and I think it will turn out great. I had to jump to yet another task, creating a texture for the counters in the GAD room. Last year, I tried to make one, and it was not good at all. It was supposed to be tileable but it there were enough discrepancies that you could easily tell it was tiled. This year, I literally just took a picture of the counter texture, and took the time to make sure it really was tileable. I'm hoping that nothing weird happens, but you never know with this project. To Do This Week:
I guess we're just not allowed to have normal weather or normal weeks anymore. Anyways, I'm gonna keep this short.
This week was figuring out the issues we have with textures. I have to alter the GAD Room walls (by disconnecting them) in order for textures to work, which is tedious, but I'm glad I'm learning this before mapping out the entire 2nd floor of the building and making all of the walls connected, because that would be a lot to fix. The GAD room is really looking great thanks to Ryan adding in all of the textures and lighting. I'm excited to see Julia's chicken NPC put into the world, but that model needs to be greatly simplified. [No picture included due to a work week cut short and no pictures were taken] To Do This Week:
This week was very short for me since it only consisted of Monday and Tuesday. I did accomplish two things though. I mostly blocked out the upper floor of the main building! I still need to add stairs and doorways, but for the most part we have a template, which means Ryan can start coding the NPC walking patterns soon. I also learned that my "keyboard solution" involved 105 textures (what was I thinking last year when I made all of those textures???), which doesn't really help in terms of lag. I need to figure out how to avoid the "Screaming Keyboard" Problem (where each poly facing up is a different surface, but each is a tiny clone of the main one) and simply make a single texture surface that just has some gaps in it. This way I could at least UVW unwrap, because currently that only leads to the Screaming Keyboard problem again. Goals for this Week
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AuthorHi, I'm Abi, a DSA student who likes games, drawing, writing, and acting. Archives
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