This week this is what the responsibilities of my other group members were:
Sam – Updating documentation and crowd implementation
Noah – Level Design and Optimization
Anson – Bug Fixing and Cat Model implementation
Patrick – Music Tracks
Daniel – Foley Work
I was tasked with concluding my development on the Cat model. When I arrived on monday to class to finish it I was struck with a pretty serious blow by my Maya instructor as he informed me that due to the topology of my cat it would not function correctly as an animated model. He then suggested that I instead take the existing cat model that Maya has, which I was unaware of Maya having preset models, and modify it.
This was difficult for me as again I felt that I had wasted time and that my work was not good enough. However my instructor spoke clearly to me that with the way the industry functions making things from scratch isn’t always the smartest option. Instead I should learn to make full use of everything Maya supplies me with to create what I need. I struggle with this as I tend to think to own anything creatively and claim it as my own I need to do it all totally myself, from scratch. This is not a healthy outlook and something I need to address
Beyond that I spent most of my time this week in substance painter making the texture for our cat. I went through several versions as my team told me what they liked and didn’t like and what needed to be changed.
This was the first prototype and they pointed to me that the face wasn’t conveying what they wanted. I leaned too far into the cute and silly aspect and they wanted me to make the cat more aggressive.
With that in mind I created this new face and using the substance tools gave the fur more variation and texture via blurs and textured erasers to create randomization in the colored fur.
They then requested that the dark patches be white and that the cat be more orange colored. Lastly a suggestion was made to add a dark gradient to the fur from top to bottom.
This gradient was actually a brilliant idea as the darker head in contrast to the lighter body added more anger to the cat’s expression which contributed to our goal of making an angry mama cat. I was also tasked with creating a rubble pile that could be used to replace destroyed buildings so that players are not standing in an empty level and lack the sense that there was a city once there.
Using Mash Placer to place bricks that I got off of Quixel alongside a deformed flor and some basic shapes I very quickly created a generic rubble pile that could be used to indicate a destroyed building. It will be textured using the shader system in our game so that it can match perfectly the textures of our other buildings.