This week was pretty relaxed, I spent all of it relearning how to UVW Unwrap, and making textbook textures. So far I've only finished a chemistry and biology textbook, but now that I have the base figured out, I could easily make other books if we want more. However, I think instead I'm going to try to work on making some bookshelves or other furniture for the new building. I need to discuss with my team what objects we really need right now, because we're getting close to the end. Goals For Next Week:
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Although this week was cut short by illness and playtesting (which I will make a seperate post about) I did manage to get the pig textured! Well... sort of... There are some surface issues, BUT! It isn't entirely my fault this time! I went back to the old, fully polyed models, and they still had some weird spots when textures were applied (though far fewer...). Anyways, I don't think it's something worth fixing at this point in production unless I can find an easy fix, or if it really bothers one of my team members. I made all of the textures metallic because I thought it made the pig look sharp and scary, but this may change depending on computer capabilities (lag) and my teammates' preferences. Goals For Next Week:
So turns out the pig is big time goofin' so looks like I have some more work to do with him. He did not transfer over to Sam's computer very well at all, many things were scaled and placed weirdly. So step one is fixing that. However, I did spend this week playing around with textures for the pig's skin. Unfortunately, our computers do not have Unity, so I am unable to currently test those textures out. (Again, Photoshop will not work for this purpose because it tries to texture every single face of the object as having the same texture.) I haven't yet made the textures tileable either, because I want to see which one I like on the model the most before doing all of that work. However, I don't think texturing will be much of an issue, I am more concerned about the export issue. This is the end of the quarter though, so I have to get moving on to modeling classroom assets. I also need to make sure that I have a plan to finish everything within the next 9 weeks so that we are able to actually finish the entire game in time.
Goals For Next Week:
I've been thinking a lot about social media lately. As someone who wants to try to make a career out of being an artist, putting my artwork out there and networking are both super important, but social media can often distract me from work. I thought that it was motivating me to make more art so that I could post more, but I reviewed my entire art account at the start of 2019, and I realized that there were entire months where I didn't make a single art post! Most of my posts came in bursts of like four pieces at once and then radio silence. I spend most of my social media time on my personal account instead of my art one, but am I really gaining anything from that?
So I'm trying to make some new social media goals for this year. Unfollow Everyone (Personal Account) This is an exaggeration, but I have been gradually unfollowing everyone who is
Post Schedule (Art Account) I don't want to have months of no content, so even if it's posting works-in-progress all of the time, I want to start having specific days that I'll post on, and I think this starts with creating an art social media trello board. This way, I can have deadlines for when to post things, as well as what I want to post (progress on project A or project B? Finished piece C?). This will also help me stick to deadlines for completing pieces since I want to be able to post. However, as a trello board, it's also flexible enough that I could always move stuff around and post random doodles if I need more content/ want to post more often. Comment on Other People's Posts More (Art Account) If social media feels more like a community and I potentially make some more art friends, I think I will feel more motivated to post. And if not, well, at least I'm letting other people know that I appreciate their work. Anyway, those are my goals, if anyone who reads this has any other tips, comment them I guess! It's fitting that as the quarter draws to a close, I have finally, FINALLY finished simplifying the pig. Finished may be an overstatement since there is always the chance that I'll have to go back (that's still a lot of vertices) but I feel good about how it looks and I don't think it will cause too many problems, especially now that our computers are working better. But I used a lot of smooth modifiers, greatly reduced the detail of the hands, and feel pretty good about how it turned out, so I'm saying that I'm finished for now!
The next step is to move on to texturing it in photoshop and unity, and then I'll pass it over to Sam so he can animate (or I could animate it myself depending on what he needs to do, because after texturing the pig, I'm pretty much down with all I've needed to do for a while). Goals for Next Week:
I'm writing this post 1/14/19, but it will be posted on 1/16 because that's the day that I'm actually presenting this work to the whole faculty and I didn't want any spoilers (Hi Mr. B). So I've been one of the officers of the GSA (Gender Sexuality Alliance, or Gay Straight Alliance) at school this year, and another club was created called the Student Equity Leadership Team. I've worked a lot with the latter this year, and that has lead up to what I'm about to do in two days: present to the entire school faculty about respecting transgender student's pronouns. As a semi-closeted trans/nonbinary kid who is only closeted because they're too scared to come out (ie not because of any danger, just fear of judgement) it's a little terrifying to know that in less than 48 hours, I will have spoken to over 100 people about respecting trans kids. However, it's also incredibly exciting to know that I'll (hopefully) be impacting future trans students at school, hopefully for the better. Anyways, in order to do this, I also made a handout in the form of a zine (a small booklet), and it was a lot like making infographics, so I'm counting it as art/graphic design for the purposes of this post. We wanted to have a handout that wasn't just another piece of paper, but that was still something that teachers could keep for future reference. It was kind of scary to make, because whenever you speak on behalf of a community, you don't want to get things wrong. The artistic aspects were fun to make though, and I think that they make the document much more interesting, especially now that it's in small booklet form on lavender paper. I want to open this post up to the larger description of activism in art though. While DSA is a very liberal school, there are definitely places where this zine - and any art with an activism undertone - could be considered propaganda, and that's another reason that it's so scary to create in this way: I don't want to be seen as some extremist who is too serious about politics. This project has really helped me learn that you can create without coming off that way: sharing your opinion, even in a biased way, doesn't mean you're extreme, it just means that you have an opinion, something that you're totally allowed to have. Respecting trans people is something near and dear to my heart that affects me and my friends, I should be able to make art about it, and express my opinions about it without feeling overly political. I can't keep being so ashamed of who I am that I hide it from my creative work. Anyways, here's a digital copy of the zine. Just getting back from break, this week was kind of just frustrating, because it took me a while to get back into the swing of things. Thankfully however, I did get back into the swing of things, and the pig has less than 3,000 polys now, but still around 5,000 vertices. I still have some simplification that I can do, and some shapes to fix on the eyes and nose, but I am confident that in 1-2 weeks it will be done, and I can move on to texturing. In more exciting news, we are testing the chicken in VR soon (once Ryan can get the lighting fixed and Sam is willing to do some VR playtesting).
Goals For This Week:
Short week. Snow days. Pig Eyes. Poly Simplification. Nuff Said. Seriously though, there was very little progress on my part this week, but I did accidentally learned about a cool feature of 3Ds Max. I was trying to merge vertices, and while this feature was unable to help me because of some really funky geometry stuff going on, it would be really useful for other situations. Basically, you can figure out how many vertices are overlapping, and then either manually or automatically, combine all of said vertices. This is a pretty basic feature, so it's probably a wonder to anyone who has ever used 3Ds Max that I didn't know about this before, but I somehow didn't. Anyways, it will certainly help me out as I continue trying to simplify 3D models. Poly simplification has also proved to be very necessary because the chicken was still too complex to animate without crashing the program multiple times. Our computers are very bad, so our polygons must be few. Goals for Next Week:
This week was all pig simplification. I feel like all of my update posts are the same now. Just about me deleting polys. I do have one new piece of info: for the smoothing tool to work the best if you've altered the polys of an object, it helps to delete the polys and reform them (this is super tedious though, so only do so when necessary). The unsmoothed structure will look more blocky because of how the shading works on the faces, but it smooths out to be seamless. I'm doing this on the pig's body, and the hands because they are both objects that were very round but also very complex that I have simplified greatly. It's going to be worth it for the result, and I have a good amount of time to work on it anyway because Sam keeps hitting technical difficulties in animating the chicken, so it will be a while before he needs the pig. One other thing I did was make a list of the current count on vertices, polygons that each section of the pig currently has so that I can see where these numbers are really coming from and what needs to be reduced. The hands may have to stay fairly complicated, because they are human hands, which are pretty complicated objects. However, the pig nose definitely has more polys and vertices than it needs to, so it is my priority for this next week. Goals for Next Week:
(PS if this list seems like less than usual, that's because I'm trying to be more realistic with what I can do in a week. This pig simplification could easily take up my next week if not a couple days of the week after. If I am somehow wrong though, trello has more jobs for me to accomplish) |
AuthorHi, I'm Abi, a DSA student who likes games, drawing, writing, and acting. Archives
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