Entry 13

 Fall Week 12 Worklog

11/13/2024 - oh no (UV unwrapping & importing...)

So this week I plan to lock in and also get back in engine a bit to make sure these models are actually gonna cooperate in unity. But first we need to experience the wonderful world of UV unwrapping which... Honestly I usually don't mind. Depends on the model of course, I'm sure if my models were of a higher polycount I'd be feeling differently. So for most of today's work session I unwrapped the assets I've got so far which was fairly straightforward...

 except...

This. stupid. tent. this should've been a simple unwrap, but for whatever reason every time I tried to flatten the UV shells it would freeze Maya and make me have to close out of it via task manager. And no matter what I did it kept. doing this. So I found a different way to unwrap. Typically my process is to create a camera-based projection of the object to the UV mapping area, and then I'll select and cut the vertices as needed. Then, I'll flatten the shells and separate and organize them. 

This, again, usually works but the tent had other plans, and unfortunately I can't really half-ass this since the tent has a very specific striped pattern so I needed to get as clean of UVs as I could. My solution was to manually select the faces of the parts of the model I wanted the pattern on, and then created a cylindrical UV mapping. From there I just had to manually adjust some slanted vertices until I got this, and thankfully the striped pattern works nicely with it! 

This was only the beginning of my troubles though as I decided to try and import into unity only to find my models weirdly transparent.

some context: last semester I made a game with the character that this environment is based on and was having... a time with the coding. Turns out turn-based games can be hard to make lol.

At first I thought this was a problem with flipped faces, but no instead it was simply the fact that I had to give the models new materials, since they were coming over from Maya and well, Mayas standard surface material doesn't exactly work in Unity. This was going to be done either way, but I didn't realize the Maya materials were causing this effect. Honestly this should've been my first conclusion but after the tent incident I thought maybe there was some problem with my faces.

Regardless, both the Press 'N Hold model and Subway model imported well and I was able to apply the textures I had made for the circus tent and gate in engine so that's good at least. Excuse some of the more... interesting placeholder texture choices on Press 'N Hold.

I do intend to go back and model some extra environmental stuff out, hell in the screenshot you can see one of the "ropes" I want to make for PNH but that'll be for another day (also the canons!). I also am absolutely going back and remodeling/moving some stuff with the subway model, partially because in engine the doors and windows look a bit odd and also guess who never did any visdev for this iteration of the subway! So during the last hour or so of my work session today I started a paintover of the subway model as seen in engine. This shouldn't take me too long since, unlike the other pieces of concept work, I actually have a model to work off of so some of the work is already done for me.

11/15/2024 - More Modeling

Upon trying to continue the paintover, I realized I didn't like how the subway was looking even from the perspective of this basic layout. So I decided to hop back into maya to fix up these structural issues. But my like 20 minutes of paintover wasn't in vain, as this rough version did help me figure out some color palettes via gradient mapping :>

Anyways, I decided to adjust the scale of some objects and also change the appearance of the seats a bit, making the bars extend upwards to replace the other hold bars seen in the old paintover/screenshots. I felt that this would give the scene a better composition and make it less... Cluttered? Honestly my biggest problem was the bars taking too much attention away from the seating area and the door. Anyways I think I like where I'm getting, just a few more adjustments and then it'll be more a matter of playing with the camera when the time comes.

In total today I worked for about 4 hours (yes I also had to re-unwrap a few things thanks to the modeling). Admittedly I am slipping a bit behind (I intended to get these environments all modeled out and unwrapped and textured but I am absolutely not going to have textures and am probably going to wait on those to get back into the game's code)... or I feel like I am anyways. I am making progress it's just not a lot of huge visible change y'know. It also doesn't help that I am currently being bogged down my some of my other classes, but things are looking to clear up for me in the near future so I'll have more time to tend to this project soon. I hope.