Sprint 6 - Redesigning and Finalizing the Warehouse

Based on feedback from the alpha build and some considerations from the rest of the team, I spent the week redesigning (~9hrs) the design of the warehouse and retexturing (~5hrs) it to fit the aesthetic of the furniture more.

Some of the changes made to the warehouse include the following. First off, the game will only support three pieces of furniture to build, therefore it was unnecessary to have five rows of scaffolding. This is also supported by our attempts to reduce the poly count as well as create more space between shelves. From the way players moved into the environment, it was clear that there was too little space between shelves to removes boxes, so this was reduced. There was also too much unnecessary space in the front of the warehouse, so everything was pushed forward more while cropping the back end a little to reduce the poly count further. The doors of the warehouse were also redesigned to add more interest in that section of the environment. (~4hrs)

Next, I UV mapped everything from the ground up. This was challenging at first because I tried to fit everything into a single texture set, which was a terrible idea. In order to save real estate on the UV maps, I separated everything by categories (boxes, walls, containers etc.) into their own texture sets. Some categories were eve cut down further as well. I also stacked a lot of the shells to provide as much working space as possible. (~5hrs)

Finally, texturing. This process went quite well because I had already developed a style I liked from when I built the furniture. This was still challenging, however, because I didn't want everything to look too similar to one another. Adding variation creates more interest so I needed to change this up a bit.

Top-Down View

Front Doors

Scaffolds

Comments

Sprint 4 - Alpha Presentation and Furniture

This week, the team presented our proposal for our project as well as demonstrated the alpha build. In its current state, the living room and warehouse environments are at their most primitive states and will be developed further over time. In future plans, I will have to redesign the living room to allocate more space to the user. It's currently too small and claustrophobic, which makes it difficult for a VR user to have enough building space. I spent the days prior to the presentation polishing the design comps then producing OBJ files of the environments to insert into A-Frame. I did this by going back and forth between a-frame and Maya and resizing the scene until it was the ideal size. This way, Mitchell is able to simply drag and drop the obj into the project without having to tweak the transformations (~5hrs). Table Model with UVs Chair Model with UVs Shelf Model with UVs After the presentations, I began working on modelling the 3 pieces of furniture that pl...

Sprint 5 - Finishing the Furniture

This week, I completed modelling (4hrs) and texturing (7hrs) the furniture that will be used in the scene. It took longer than I expected because I had difficulty nailing down an art style while also working with new techniques in Substance Painter that I wasn't familiar with. A big challenge was finding a style that I really liked and understanding how to achieve that. My experience is more in realistic modelling and texturing where it's easy to see where things don't look right. However, with stylized pieces, it's up to my own interpretation. I'm also working with a very base, low-resolution mesh because I want to avoid creating too much detail through normal or height maps. The simpler, the better, but, the simpler, the less there is to work with. The grand solution in nailing down a flexible art style was through the use of ambient occlusion. By baking the same model over itself, I get an AO map, which already improves the look dramatically as it removes ...

Polishing Snapping and Spawning Objects

Finishing the alpha prototype made up the majority of the work completed this week (~20 hours), but even after the alpha presentation there was still some more work and polishing to do with snapping components together (~4 hours), and then work began on dynamically spawning modular furniture (~2 hours) pieces and that will be the focus of this coming week. Creating the snapping functionality we desired for our alpha prototype proved to be quite the challenge, and this was not because of the logic or technical requirements behind snapping objects, but rather due to some limitations of the A-Frame Physics System library. Before going into these limitations I will go over the two approaches taken to try and create this functionality. The original approach was to take the smaller piece that was attached parent it to the larger object, and then apply translations to the piece to line it up correctly. However, in practice sometimes the transformations would not appl...

Build-a-Furniture

Search This Blog