Entry 16

 Winter Break Worklog 2 (January)

1/1/2025

Happy New Year! I cleaned Doc's walksprites today which took roughly 2 hours, an hour on the front and an hour on the back respectively.

I also decided to go back and add some shading to the underside of the mask and color the lineart of the hooves. Now all that's left to clean is the jump and then get these guys working in engine.

1/2/2025 - 1/6/2025

Across the span of these past couple of days I've been wrapping up Doc's jump/land sprites. In total these took me roughly 6 hours, I worked in usually 1-2 hour increments as I've been doing some other things this break as well as this (helping out on some friends projects, doing some personal art, uh... sleeping) While making these I also added some touch ups to the previous sprites (just adjusting the colored line art on the hooves and adding some to the clasp thingy on their cape). But all of their controller sprites are done! I'll eventually have to make more for any sort of cutscenes I may decide to do (so like, sitting on the train for instance).

 Anywho, next work session I'm gonna get back into 3D stuff since I'm a bit behind with that (hiiii Cloudskipper). I'll implement these goobers... eventually.

1/7/2025

I am finally getting into making the actual Cloudskipper models. I didn't get a ton done within the 3 hours I was working in call with some friends, just starting to refine the starting area's structure thingy.

1/9/2025 - 1/10/2025: Into Blender

One of my initial goals with this project was to use it to get myself to learn more about 3D model creation, and one of the specific things I wanted to do was finally get more into Blender after putting it off for... who knows how many years at this point. I'm not completely new and have toyed around in blender before so I have a very surface level understanding of the software. I remember making a janky little heart model in freshman year with it before getting more into 3D in maya and I also retopologized a 3D model to try and make a printable paper cutout of it for a cosplay I was building, the latter of these things being the deepest I've went with the software.

So I've decided to try and model out all of the more simple Cloudskipper Platforms in Blender to get more acquainted with it. If I'm able to I would like to try and UV and work on the textures in here as well.

My first day, the 9th, was spent on and off the program modeling out the spinner platform which consists of two parts: the flat top platform part and the bottom part that I'm envisioning being like... dirt or rocks/rubble dangling from the disk. It was straightforward and most of my roadblocks came from trying to figure out the hotkeys and menus, though unfortunately I forgot to set my stopwatch so I'm not sure how long I spent.

Today, having more energy, I decided to UV unwrap the models which took about an hour and a half. I think I'm getting use to the program faster than I expected, a thing that had been putting me off for ages about blender was the key mapping so it's surprising that its sticking haha.

 

Whenever I work next I'm going to attempt to texture, whether that be tomorrow or in a few days. 

1/15/2025

Finally getting into texturing today and honestly I think I might texture the rest of my models in blender going forward, as I've found myself taking to the process surprisingly fast. Research/looking at tutorials included, I worked for 3 hours and 47 minutes today and actually got most of the spinner texturing done!

 I wound up moving my UV's around and splitting the top and bottom spinner into two separate textures

 

It would've been entirely done had blender not eaten the completed texture work I did for the top :,3 Basically what happened is that saving the scene does NOT also save any changes you make to a texture image, you have to click "image" in that lower lefthand box and save it through there. It shouldn't take me too long to redo thankfully now that I know my way around more but still sucks.

1/16/2025

Starting out today's session, I spent about 30 minutes redoing the top of the spinner, so now that's done!

 

My next step was trying to get this into Unity. In terms of my textures and such that actually wasn't too bad! I wound up just making a new material with my exported baked textures in unity as opposed to trying to export a material out of blender, so that worked relatively fine.

The problems arrived when I tried applying the spinner script...

 I forgot that blender has the Z axis pointing up instead of Y. Oops.

I'll have to re-export out of blender to fix this and then re-import, but I think I'll work on the other models I have in the scene since I at least know that the textures import fine.

I only worked for an hour total today, hopefully tomorrow I'll be able to focus better.

also I am aware of that flipped normal I'll fix it back in blender

1/20/2025

This'll be my last entry in this work log as classes resumes for me tomorrow! I didn't get as much done during the break as I had hoped but hey I didn't have a set goal in mind and still took a chunk out of the work I would've had to do this semester so it's something.

Anyways, as for today's work session I decided to model out the rest of the smaller platforms that were also in the spinner's file to get em out of the way. I worked for 2 hours and finished modeling out modular pieces for the various pillars around the stage, mostly making broken variants of the body and small rubble pieces. I still need to unwrap and texture but I'll get to that another time, either next work session or whenever I model out the remaining platform(s).