CAGD 373
Game Scene
December 11th, 2019 - Week 9
Jesus, Mary, and Joseph...we made it, kids. Never thought we would get to this moment all in one piece, but we hecking did it.
So let's recap. What happened? What did we do? What was the story? Who made what? What struggles did we go through? What was the end result? Well...I'll tell ya.
Story/Inspiration:
Our main draw specifically to that planet/city was to be able to play around with a nighttime scene and the idea of emmissive maps all around the scene seemed like a fun challenge to integrate into the scene. In our scene, the main story centers around Claptrap. Since he was our "hero piece", we placed him right next to our animated object and the end goal is to find Claptrap and the loot that he has for you.
Objects:
We had a lot of objects within our scene, something that we definitely regretted, but took pride in:
(italics = textured)
Structures:
Tall Buildings (4) - Parker, Dylan, Shawn, Olivia
Small Buildings (4) - Dylan and Olivia
Assets:
Ammo pickups (4) - Alex, Olivia
Barrel - Shawn, Olivia
Cardboard Boxes - Olivia
Cars - Dylan, Shawn
CL4P-TP(GAMER) - Parker, Olivia
Concrete road barricade - Parker, Olivia
Dumpster - Olivia, Shawn
Grenade - Alex, Olivia
Hyperion Ammo Chest - Shawn
Loot Locker - Shawn
Mailbox - Parker, Olivia
Medium loot box - Dylan, Olivia
Public bench - Shawn, Olivia
Small Money Safes - Dylan, Olivia
Street Light - Olivia, Shawn
Street barricade poles - Shawn
Truck (with flatbed) - Dylan, Shawn
Particle Effects:
Fire - Alex
Pick up trail - Alex
Blue smoke (haze) - Alex
Problems and Solutions:
When creating this project, we ran into plenty of problems, as most projects do. The first thing that we definitely ran into was an issue with falling off the wagon. Now I am not saying that we did not manage our time properly, but we agreed upon a calendar that somewhere around week 5 we didn't stick to anymore. Of course we had that last minute crunch, but somehow having a calendar at least made us a little more successful in surviving that. Another issue that we ran into was UVing. Due to the fact that this was a huge project that we all worked on over time, we didn't all really think in terms of a pipeline. Where we really ran into our UV struggles was when we were getting everything into Substance Painter. Painter has no mercy for stacked shells or unfortunate UVs, so it became very obvious when something was not the way that it needed to be. This then led to a lot of re-UVing and more time taken out of our resources. The last issue that we ran into was a lighting problem in Unity. We could only have three people working in the Unity scene at one time, therefore, two of our humans were in the dark with what was happening. When Alex programmed the shader, we did not realize that the pipeline would only allow us to have four lights rendering on an object at a time so when we started putting all the lights into the scene, we ran into the issue of not being able to add anymore lights (or they wouldn't turn on). After showing our work to Pozzi the next morning, we came across an epiphany. We didn't need to lower the intensity of the main directional light in the scene. To get the feel that we wanted, all we had to do was change the color of the light...and boom. Magic.
Time Frame (approximately):
Modeling and UVing: 30 hours
Texturing: 42 hours
Unity Parts: 20 hours
Lighting: 6 hours
The End Product: Click here to see the walk through
I am so proud of all the work that our team did together and even through everything that we went through, it was a journey that we took together. I hope that I can work with this great group of humans again soon, but until then, I hope you enjoy. :)
Until next time!
Love Always,
The Lonely Chaps
(to show a little bit of the process; the thing I completely modeled and textured)
(to show a little bit of the process; the thing I completely modeled and textured)
December 4th, 2019 - Week 8
Guess who’s still the baby tomato? You were correct. It’s me.
Like I said last week, all kinds of scheduling are just obliterated. It’s not because we are intentionally trying to be off schedule, we are just busy humans with lives that didn’t know how much time things would actually take.
In the realm of texturing, we are slowly and surely getting there. Besides what we already had done, Alex and Shawn so kindly laid out the rest of the texture sheets for the assets and Shawn and I have set to work on those. We ran into some UV errors with Dylan and Parker, so we are working to fix those too, but we also have those textures. I was also able to texture Claptrap and I am oh, so excited about that.
Beyond that, we are doing our best to get things into Unity. Alex has been a godsend with busting things out. He was able to import all the assets we have so far, even if they are only lambert gray, into the scene and is getting everything blocked out the way that Shawn had intended it to be.
I don’t mean to toot our own horn here a little, but it’s been lookin pretty great so far.
I am very excited to see the end result as it’s been a long time coming getting here. Seeing the toon filter applied to our models makes me pretty happy as well. I know that Alex worked very hard on that one, so to see his hard work come to life brings a smile to my face.
This time next post, we will be done. WHO’S PUMPED?? I know I am. :)
Until next time!
November 20th, 2019 - Week 7
What did the Mama Tomato say to the Baby Tomato when walking in the park? Ketchup!
I am the baby tomato.
As far as scheduling goes, it has kind of gone out the window. Not that that's a bad thing, but it's not always a good thing. I am a worry wart when it comes to submissions, deadlines, and schedules, so this is causing me anxiety like no other...I just keep telling myself: this is fine.
As far as texturing goes, we are still roughly in the same spot. We have still accomplished a lot, just not in the realm that we are looking for. This was not completely our fault though. We have a blocked out scene, most of our ID maps are complete, and we have two buildings that are textured. Herein lies the issues: 1) I am a little incompetent when I am sleep deprived (or a lot of incompetent) and 2) programs love crashing.
I finished texturing that second building, but I messed up the fbx exportation a lot a bit. So, we are going to cross our fingers and pray that Photoshop will treat us well. The plan is to composite the two maps together, but in the event that that does not work...well...more trouble shooting will happen.
The other big feature of the week was crashing programs. Parker had a Maya problem. Dylan had a Maya problem. Shawn had a Maya problem. Alex had a Unity problem. I had a Substance and computer problem. We're a mess.
Though we might be dogs in a burning building sipping tea, we are still holding our lives together for the most part.
November 13th, 2019 - Week 6
So...basically, at the beginning of this project, I had no idea what Trello was or how to use it and now I feel like I at least know that much. Additionally, because I did not know how to use it, the rest of my group members were memeing around on it a little bit. Continuing to where we are at this week, they made a list called "Jen's List" and on that list there was one item.
The week has come for Jen to complete that Trello card.
Hello everyone and happy Week 6!
I will be quite honest with you, we are a little bit behind schedule. I was expecting it though!
I would like to congratulate myself on the fact that I can prepare for bad weather and I know my friends and the way that they work. This week, the goal was to get all of the buildings textured....well...that did not happen as planned. But that's okay (or at least that is what I keep telling myself).
We kept running into problems when were trying to make Maya be cooperative with all of our scene files. When we would transfer the objects into the scene, the UV shells would break or be flipped and then, inevitably, Maya would crash. Why? Well. I don't know.
It was so frustrating to work on that I did not want to work on it at all. I know that others were attempting to finish some of the other things. We were able to get some of the smaller assets exported as .fbx files and Shawn and Parker were working tirelessly trying to get the last of their models done. It was also a week of ID mapping and trying to get Maya to function properly.
At the end of the day, all the models that we wanted should be complete and UVed, we are just trying to figure out the ID map and UV shell situation. I was able to get two of the buildings in one scene without them breaking, however. I was able to texture one complete building and then the other one is nearly done...it just needs the Olivia touch on it.
I have established a workflow that should work in regards to texturing, so that I will not be the only one doing it. We will have to see how next week goes but I am hanging on for Fall Break where I know I can get a lot done.
It has been quite the adventure. We will have to see where this one takes us.
Very excited to see everything coming together. :)
November 6th, 2019 - Week 5
There are lots of things happening...and not happening all at the same time...but that's okay.
After an stress induced panic attack, I realized that we really are fine, but I love my schedules and stick to them like glue, thus, this is an anxiety attack in the making!
For the most part, modeling was done this week and I have never been more proud of my team and all that they are doing.
We finally got the rest of the buildings modeled and I think that is where the jumping off point is pretty much going to be for this upcoming week.
After last week's conversation and the wish list creation, we were able to mostly manage the rest of the assets...I say mostly just because of the time constraint piece. We didn't do them timely, but we did them!
I felt bad after dying last week and I was able to make a large slew of assets this week. UVing was where things got a little bit tricky. The thing that I think that I struggled with the most was that I was modeling fast and not paying complete attention to what I was doing, thus making hidden faces and n-gons that were inconvenient when UVing (because you didn't know that they were there). I ended up spending 2 hours UVing a piece that should have taken 30 minutes tops because of two hidden faces on the inside.
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| All the things that I created and UVed this week |
Shawn has been modeling a barrel as well as the rest of a building and a barrier pole. Parker was finishing up his UVs on his building and on Claptrap. He was also able to model a barrier and a mailbox. Alex was finishing collecting particle effects, keeping my panic attacks in check, and made sure to finish modeling his ammo pick up pieces. Dylan has been UVing insane pieces because he loves me as well as modeling another building.
We are still staying organized on Trello and I am so proud of the progress that we are getting through and the game plan has changed ever so slightly, but that's okay. I am hoping to get everything organized in Maya and laid out by the end of class so that we can spend the rest of the sprint working on those awesome building textures.
Onward and upward. I am so so happy with my group and all the things we do.
October 30th, 2019 - Week 4
Greetings from my week of death....almost quite literally.
Welcome back to my circus, here are my monkeys for the week.
Brought to you by the entire crew, we pretty much have a very basic scene going on. After last week when I got everything all together and organized, I was able to task the rest of the group with the individual things that needed to be done. My main concern was that by the end of this week, we would have the buildings all modeled and UVed...or at least that was the dream. We ran into a few road bumps this week.
Beyond all the schoolwork that was bogging the group down, I hit a few snags of my own. I had my weekly mental breakdown, so that was cool, and I happened to catch the plague of the Residence Halls...also known as a mixture of stress and an ear infection. With all that, I think it was pretty fair to say that I was feeling pretty crappy.
The rest of the team pulled through, however. All but two of the buildings were modeled this week as well as most of them being UVed and ready for export. Upon realizing all the things that were going on in our lives, I sat down with the team and decided that it would be necessary to revisit all the things that were going to be happening.
A chat over Discord created a new list on our Trello board called “Wish List”, or our stretch goals. I knew that if we wanted to maintain a proper timeline, some sacrifices were going to have to be made. I told the team that we should decide the things that were going to make our scene what we wanted and then have another list of things that we could do if time permits and we want to take our scene from good to great. All of our models are fantastic and we are in a pretty good spot right now, our biggest factor is time. I knew that if we wanted to make things look as nice as we wanted with the completed textures, we would need to prioritize the things that were most important to us in the scene.
With that all squared away, I think that this week to come is going to be a lot of work, but we are going to make it happen. I am excited to show all the buildings that we have made together and I cannot wait to see what everything starts looking like with the textures!
Until next week, let’s get this bread.
October 23rd, 2019 - Week 3
Hello again! Back so soon?
Well, here we are again with more progress. I can honestly tell you that I am super proud of my team and all that we are accomplishing. The models are coming together and everything is remaining organized in the process.
Thanks to Shawn, we have a bench, an electrical box, a locker, and a crate; thanks to Dylan, we have a flatbed truck and a small safe (that can be animated!!); thanks to Parker, we have another completed building, ready for texturing, and a Claptrap(!!!); thanks to Alex, we have one of our ammo pick-ups and a chest for the ammo pick-ups to be inside; and as for me, I have been running the ship, putting together a calendar and a progress sheet, and I have modeled a staircase and half of a new building!
It may not look in total like there has been a ton of progress made, but the things that we have been doing are simply fantastic. We have a lot going for us, we are staying organized, and we have a goal in mind. By looking at the calendar, it is easy to determine when things need to be done to stay on track.
I am super proud of everything that we have been doing and can't wait to see all the progress that we make in the next coming weeks.
That is all for now :) (knock on wood that there are no bumps in the road next week, so far, we are smooth sailing).
October 16th, 2019 -Week 2
Hello from the Borderlands!
We are back and better than ever this week with more progress!
After getting all of our concepts down last week, we went right into all the things this week. Courtesy of Shawn, we have a block out of the scene that he created in ProBuilder using Unity and he also created an annotated map to go with that; courtesy of Alex, we have a basis of what our cell shading is going to look like when we drop everything into Unity; courtesy of Dylan, we have a car asset to put into our scene; and courtesy of Parker and I, we have some running models of our buildings.
I also like to take pride in the fact that our group has a very organized Trello Board to track all of our progress. We have been making sure to finish our tasks throughout the week and get everything verified by our lead.
Last week we all pitched in and generated our asset list, so that is also available on our Google Drive for us all to view.
We have our tasks, we have progress going, and we are continuing to work. I would like to think that we have a recipe for success going so far. In the next coming week, I would like to generate a calendar/schedule for my team and I to make sure that we are staying on track with all the things that we want to happen. I know that, on behalf of my entire team, we want this to look good to maybe add to a portfolio or whatnot, thus, I want all the bells and whistles for us; to do that, we need a schedule. On top of that, I hope to get some more modeling done. The sooner I get my models in, the sooner we can texture and (in theory) the cooler the textures will look. :)
So that is all for this week. Not as much going, but still quite a bit!
See you next week!
October 9th, 2019 - Week 1
Greetings from 373...aka...fun.
This is a new assignment! Just like the game scene that we had in 230, we shall have another game scene in this class...and Shawn will download the correct version of Unity. HAHA.
All jokes aside, I think that this is going to be a great project. We have our group set. It shall be me and four other hooligans. The goal of this project is to replicate a game scene from Borderlands 3 using models, textures, some ambient sounds, add some animations and particle effects, and of course, to make the scene playable in Unity. 
This first week is all about concepting. We began out Trello Board (complete with memes), we have a Pinterest board going, and we have a shared Google Drive for the purpose gathering reference and tracking our progress as a team. From our research travels, we have decided to go with a scene that is based off of the planet Promethea. Shawn already so excellently went into the game and got a bunch of reference image, so we have a great head start for the week. We thought that it would be something interesting and we could explore the use of emissive maps in Substance Painter. As you can see from the concept images above and to the right, there is a lot of freedom for easy modeling, but some challenge in the texture department. I will tell you, it is Week 1 and I will hopefully have a weekly report for you on how we are feeling about the cell shading, but we will cross that bridge when we get there. Right now, we are hopeful.
So...because I am the over achieving individual I am, I also started modeling a little bit this week. Looking at the images that Shawn dropped in the Drive, I picked a building a just started going ham. So far, this is what it looks like:
It definitely did not come without a challenge though. I made some accidental double extrusions here and there so I cleaned those up a little bit and also had a little bit of a face issue. I will talk to Jen and Tony about that at a later date, but right now, the base model for the structure is not only modeled...but also UVed and laid out in the 0 to 1 space. The next step in this journey is to put some extra elements on there to give it some detail as well as make it something that is not just a building. If you are wondering what it is based off of, I have put the images of the building below:
Then also!! Our group decided it would be a fun thing to have a little bit of character in the assets of the scene, thus we decided that we wanted Claptrap, a friendly robot, to join the scene somewhere. He might not be moving around with you...well...that's could be a wishlist thing...but we will have a model of him somewhere in the scene. Parker wanted the honors of modeling our friend, and was looking for a tutorial but I told him it would be easier to just find a reference image and go ham. In showing him how to do that...well...I pretty much modeled the entire base model of Claptrap...so yea. I have composited a photo of our friend with the model I created here:
...and that is all for this week! Stay tuned for (possibly less) progress from next week! :)
Sci-Fi Hallway
September 22nd, 2019
In this assignment, the goal at the end was to be able to get an understanding of modular modeling and how to do it. In this modular modeling assignment, we were tasked with making a sci-fi hallway. Besides just the modeling, the other goals were to texture in Substance Painter, add sound effects and animations in Unity, as well as to make particle effects to add some flare to our scene.
It would not be a CAGD project if there were not some errors and unplanned for problems that occurred in the process of this. My first major problem that I ran into was the fact that I simply could not figure out what I wanted to do. I was scrolling through Pinterest and finding all these concepts of Sci-Fi hallways but none of them really sparked my interest. The ones I did end up liking were either too simple or not cohesive. Once I finally got some semblance of what I wanted to do, then it was troubleshooting in Maya with the complex design that I was going after. Instead of going for a normal shape, like I probably should have, I ended up making the hallway a hexagonal shape. In hindsight, it would have been smarter to make a boxy hallway.
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| Too simple, but I liked it...?? |
I ended up solving things as I went. Baking was a lot of what looked good and what didn't look good. I knew that the most important part was that the final product looked good so it didn't really matter if I was "playing by the book" (at least as far as baking settings went). When it came to lining things up in Unity, it was a little bit of a struggle. Even though I set all of my pivot points up in Maya, Unity decided that it didn't care. Thankfully, Unity does math functions for me and all of my models were in scale of each other! Praise the Unity Gods for creating a very functional coordinate system. The snapping tool was another bear. Since the pivot points were not there, the snapping was mostly just for rotations. I took it to Google to ask what the hotkey was to keep things on an axis and I got two different answers. It was not until about 3 sides of the loop later that I realized I was using the wrong key and then got things to properly rotate on axes....so if you look ever so slightly, things are just that much off of the precise rotational axis.
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| A look at the texture maps for the scene |
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| It took a good minute to make sure that things would line up in Maya first so that I would not run into issues when importing into Unity... |
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| The hallway loops back on itself, but here is a view from the corner of the corridor (don't look too closely or you will see what I did wrong...!!) |
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