The Village Blog #8

For this two weeks I have been finishing up the houses and adding a few more models from my asset list. I then decided to start UVing the houses to get it setup for the ID process then moving on to the texturing process. In the picture above is the bottom borders that I have made to my first two houses

I decided to start working on other assets that I have planned to add to my level. I started with the lamp post so I could light up my level if I ever decided to take the approach into the night time. 

It was a simple but tedious process to make the lamp until eventually I cam to a block where I had to create the loops on the post. I tried using the curve process to create my loops but in the end I did not like how they turned out. 

I decided to make it less curvy and more blocked out. I like this style too since it fits with the low poly theme that I was going for this lamp. 

After finishing up with the lamp, I have then started to create a fence since it was simple to make. When I was done with the fence I have then decided that it was time to start the UV process. 

I started with the simple house since there was not a ton of assets that needed to be UVed. The process was easy since most of the models were not too complex to UV. 

I then moved on to the second house where there was a ton of assets that needed to be UVed. I started on one of the mini buildings which was a bit tricky to do. My main problem was UVing the fences since the UVs would show up distorted. This was easily fixed by adding a few cuts to make the unfolding process more flexible.

The small house was also a bit tricky and that was because of the fences once again. After adding the necessary cuts to the UV i was able to finish the rest of the house with ease. 

Thankfully the middle house was a simple process to UV since there was not any complex geometry that I needed to work around. The walls were simple to do as well as the roof of the house. 

Although this looks incredibly messy, it became a simple fix once I had attached all the vertices. I started to realize how much I need to double check my model to make sure that everything is connected so I wouldn't have to deal with it when it comes to UVing. 

After finishing up UVing the bottom borders, stairs, and the door to the house I decided to put them all in their own UV set. I ran into a issue where once I have set the layout for them it ends up becoming small and bunching up at the bottom of the UV set.

It took some adjusting to do but eventually I resized all the UVs to their proper sizes. For the next week I plan on finishing up the UVs for the third house as well as the rest of the assets that I made. Once I have made the UVs I will then move on to IDing them and finally start texturing on them. 

I also wanted to mention that currently I have experienced three crashes while working on this project. For some reason I am currently stuck on working on the highlighted file and even though I do rename it, it just created another scene when I am trying to save. For now however I am just glad that I was still able to retain my work after those crashes. 

The Village Blog #7

For this week I have planned on finishing up my cleaning up the edges for my last two houses. I have been told that they needed to be improved on and be lessened. During the time that I have worked on the cleanup there have been no problems at all except when it comes to getting rid of the edges between the middle windows in the second picture. Currently I have not found out a way to get rid of these edges so I just left it as it is and focused on cleaning up the rest of the house. 

As I was cleaning up the roof i came to realize that the triangle pieces could be lessened of edges too. I've made sure to go back and lessen the edges for the triangles in my previous house as well.

The clean up process for the last house went smoothly as well except for one again in the second picture where it became difficult removing the extra edges between the door and the window. 

Now that I have finally finished cleaning up the edges for all of my houses, I plan on quickly UVing them, texturing them in Substance Painter, and moving on with modeling the other pieces for my level. So far I am way behind from the schedule that I have set myself and since it is only going to get busier in the semester I am going to go back on my modeling list and make some cuts to it so I more time to focus on level design in Unity than modeling in Maya. If it turns out that I finish earlier than expected then I will them add the models I wanted in my level. 

The Village Blog #6

For this week I have mainly started on fixing up the UVs for my houses since I have been told that they could be further improved and look a bit more clean. For now this has made a small delay in my plans to organize the UVs and start painting on them which is why I plan to at least finish the clean up process for this week. 

So far the process to clean up my UVs have been pretty smooth so far and I definitely see a improvement in them compared to my previous ones. 

It got a bit tricky trying to find a way to remove the line that you see on the door but sadly it is going to be necessary to reduce the amount of lines needed on the top left window. 

Here is another example of how clean the UVs are on this wall compared to the last screenshot that I took in my previous blog posts. This will help in guaranteeing a good frame rate in Unity. 

 After finishing up cleaning the UVs for this little building I realized too late that I accidentally deleted some walls that I meant to hide on the left side of the house. Thankfully I still had a export of the model that I saved on my USB drive which thankfully saved me the hassle of rebuilding the walls again. 

I still had to do some minor adjustments to it but in this screenshot I wanted to show the problems that I had with this exported model when I tried to extrude the faces. It was easily fixed by deleting the face and creating a new one but I have been told for next time to export it as a OBJ instead of a FBX to avoid this issue. 

After making the minor adjustments once again I then made sure to clean up the edges. Most of the edges that were reduced were mostly from the door frame. 

Most of the edges that I have deleted and cleaned up were unnecessary on the model. I was under the assumption that I may have needed them to ensure good detail when put into Substance Painter but I was assured that it wasn't the case. 

After the big clean up process for the third house I decided to create a door for it before I moved on to cleaning the second and first house as a change of pace. For the rest of this week my sole focus is going to be cleaning up the UVs for the second and first house so I could move on to modeling little details on them and eventually reach the texturing phase. 

Castle on Wheels Blog #2

For this third sprint I was assigned 6 tasks in which 5 of them was entirely focused on the completion of level 4. I am currently working on the 6th task which is now creating maps for the 8th level of our game. 

A majority of my time has been spent on placing the assets that I want in my level and making sure that the enemy assets are in their proper places. In order to make the trees look organic and less repetitive in which they are placed I had to place them one by one. 

This took quite a while but in the end it payed off knowing that the trees and also the rocks in the level does not look like a copy and paste. The assets that could not be made in time for my level have purple primitives as placeholders making it easy for my to just simply replace them.  

My next task was to create a path for the castle to follow which is represented by the red line on the level. The way that it works is that for every point you place it creates a line which is what the castle follows. When it comes to the curves in the path we had to make sure it was extra smooth so the castle does not look robotic when making a turn. 

Once the castle path was created we had to add in the navigator mesh system which was pretty simple to place on to the level thanks to the programmers. We just had to make sure that there was no errors when it comes to what the units can and cannot walk on. 

My final completed task was to simply replace the placeholder blocks that I had for enemy spawners and replace them with the now coded enemy spawners. So far when it comes to the enemy actually spawning on the field it works but it still needs some more coding to be done by our fellow programmers. Since currently after this task there was not much to do for us level designers we have now started the process of creating maps for later future levels