My concrete goals for the week were to finish materials for the mothership and begin the other items needed for the game like the different equipment needed for each role, the virus, and the bad ending animation.
I was able to finish stabilizing the model for the mothership. I made the model more symmetrical and resolved any z-fighting by rearranging the vertices and faces of the model. Now I should be able to do the UV map quickly then color the mothership.
This week I also spent time trying to resolve issues with rendering the materials for the playerships. I need to remember to check the triangulated mesh and color option before exporting the Blender files, and to check the filepaths in the material file.
It took longer than expected to resolve disappearing triangles (z-fighting) in the mothership model, but I'm glad that I finished within a week. We also received approval to utilize some free Blender models, so I will use some free assets with some tweaks for the rest of the game items. This should speed up the process since we are almost at the end of the quarter.
I hope that I can finish the materials for the mothership and figure out the animation for the bad ending. I talked with another artist for CSE 125 and they advised me to try Blender modeling. It might be slightly faster than hand-drawing the animation.
I learned that I'm a little faster at resolving z-fighting because I am used to more of the Blender shortcuts and functions.
I was more nervous about trying to implement the rest of the game visuals, but we can use premade Blender assets so that will be very helpful.