Sofia's Week 6 Report

what were your concrete goals for the week?

My concrete goals for this week was to make sure the asteroids were renderable in-game and to finish the ship skins.

what goals were you able to accomplish?

I was able to accomplish modeling, rescaling, and centering asteroids.

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 ran into some more setbacks because of other projects and because I needed to figure out how to make the asteroid files smaller. It was lots of trial and error on the part of the asteroids. I discussed with my other team members, and we agreed that the asteroids needed to be less detailed. While the increased detail caused the model files to be larger than necessary, it was difficult to remove details, in the form of modifiers, because when enough are removed or when certain modifiers are removed in certain orders, the asteroids turn into smooth rocks. That is not very asteroid-like.

what are your specific goals for the next week?

Next week, I really hope to finish those dang ships! I must move onto model the unique player attachments (which correspond to each special role) and find a good 2D render of a planet.

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

This week, I learned to ask for which specific axis(es) the programmers want the model to be centered in. While centering the asteroids, I realized that the ship models were centered only in the X and Y directions and not in the Z direction like the asteroids. This might explain some of the render bugs. It also turns out that asteroids scaled to the size of the ships means the asteroid is too big! Haha! I also learned how to join meshes together to create one solid object; this should help with creating cohesive textures for the models.

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

I am a little overwhelmed because I have quite a few more game assets to complete. I am also frustrated that the ships are harder to texture than I thought. I talked to our graphics programmer, and we came to the conclusion that pursuing a hard sci-fi aesthetic would not be feasible with our remaining time. I'm a little disappointed but also relieved.