This week this is what the responsibilities of my other group members were:
Sam – Continued updating and maintaining our schedule alongside development of concept art and other design aspects for our game.
Noah – Continued to greybox the levels for our game and creating the game world our players would play around in.
Anson – Continued on refining the procedural animation of our cat and adding combat functionality like swiping.
Patrick – Composed the main theme of our game that we will use as music in game
Daniel – Collected foley for our sound effect use
I personally started to develop the cat model that would be used to replace the current stand in model. While I have in the time given so far made a basic outline for the cat it is far from complete. While I originally wanted to finish and rig it this week was filled with work from other courses and complications from issues on my end from misunderstanding priorities causing me to have to split my time up significantly.
This was most easily my busiest and toughest week of the project so far and likely will be the toughest of the project in its entirety. With not only how difficult modeling the cat has proven to be taking longer than I had originally planned leaving me further behind on it than I wanted. But in addition to all this the overwhelming work load from my other classes in addition to me having to go back to the building models to attempt to make the hollow as I had misunderstood the pipeline and was unintentionally holding up the creation of a first proper prototype. Despite working several hours to make it ‘thick’, IE turning the shell to have density to it so when its shattered it is a wall that breaks apart instead of a single solid block. Ultimately I couldn’t get it to work properly and the results were not what my group wanted. Instead I passed over the models to my group whom broke it apart in Blender using the technique they developed for their test buildings.
One thing I did do before passing the models over was organizing the UVs to function with the shaders. An example is here below.
The idea being that the shader functions by breaking the UV area into 4 groups that we determined. Top left is primary material, bottom left secondary, top right for windows and bottom right for misc objects, mostly doors. This was set up so we can procedurally texture the models so we can have a large color variety.
My failures to meet deadlines and the slow progress of certain models alongside my time being stretched across four different projects contributed to a burn out that I had this week. It has made me feel as if I was a burden to my group and a failure. That being said I also know that this is my first time doing anything like this and my progress from knowing nothing about modeling to where I am now in the span of 4 months is something I should be proud of. I know where my failures lie and I will do my best to address them. I can only be thankful of how supportive my group was and understanding with my issues.