Sofia's Week 5 Report

what were your concrete goals for the week?

This week I wanted to add details to the model and materials to the two ships. First, I needed to create UV maps and learn how to 'color' the material.

what goals were you able to accomplish?

I was able to create UV maps and somewhat figured out how to add materials. I only added materials to one ship however. This does not included detailing. The two ship models are still low polygon renders. I also tried to uniformly scale the models so that the programmers can properly scale the player and mother ship in game, without too much extra computation.

if the week went differently than you had planned, what were the reasons? note that this happens regularly...I would prefer you to be aggressive in what you want to try accomplish rather than limit yourself to goals you know you'll easily achieve. so answering this question is more of a reflection on the development process and the surprises you encounter, it's not at all an evaluation.

I really wanted to be able to add materials to both ship models, and I wanted to add detailing like panels and curves. I'm disappointed and frustrated that it took me so long to debug my way through adding materials to the models. The UV mapping was also frustrating because I learned that one of my ships has Z-fighting and missing edges so the distortion negatively affected the UV mapping and thus the material. I really do not want to redo the ship models, but there's a chance because I was asking another CSE 125 artist how to Blender and I was advised to join my separate model parts into one. We shall see.

what are your specific goals for the next week?

For Week 5, I plan to start and finish an asteroid model for the game. I won't go through the entire low-poly to detailed process like I did for the ships because the asteroid should be done quickly so that I can return to adding more details and textures to the two ships. If I have more time, I might create some additional materials for the asteroids so that they look slightly unique in game.

what did you learn this week, if anything (and did you expect to learn it)?

I learned that perfect geometry in Blender is good so that you can have nice UV maps. Nice UV maps mean your painted textures will not act weird and appear in unexpected places. Blender is hard and it turns out that you need a solid geometric model, with the right vertices and edges, before simply adding materials (color and texture) because the material and textures go on top of the base model.

what is your individual morale (which might be different from the overall group morale)?