Y3 Week 2: Catching Up
The last week has been a bit irritating for myself. I faced quite an annoying problem right at the beginning of the week, which was being able to hit the 10,000 tri limit with my gun model. Now, you might think that it's great that I was so far below the limit, yet I felt as though being far below the limit shows that my model was lacking something.
I had been given some feedback on Monday though, which lessened this problem a bit. I was being told that my own two cents that I was supposed to add to the design at the beginning weren't enough and that I should further think about how certain aspects of the gun worked. How were things attached for example? I was also encouraged to add a bit more to the gun to make it more unique.
So I went back onto the connection point and thought about how one would actually attach an upside down chainsaw onto a shotgun, making sure the whole contraption wouldn't fall apart. Previously I only had a massive extruded piece coming down that would magically hold it in place, so it made sense to think about this more carefully. I decided on using a metal bar with 2 screw plates welded on either side, which has then been screwed into the chainsaw and shotgun respectively. I added quite a few bolts here and there to secure other attachments as well.
I also ended up adding a flashlight onto the shotgun body. Instead of bolts, this one was being held in place by tape and cable ties though. I thought it would add a bit more personality to the gun if some parts were just strapped on. Both of these modifications ended up getting me to a total of ~7,900 tris, Still just over 2k tris under the limit, but I was happy enough with it to go forward to unwrapping.
Once again this stage proved to be slightly problematic. I was planning on splitting up my texture budget and use a couple of smaller textures instead of one large texture sheet. I mainly did this as it's easier for me to unwrap a complex model in parts, but also since I find it a bit intimidating being faced with a massive texturesheet with loads of information on. I overheard people planning on doing similar things, yet we soon found out that we couldn't do that.
With feedback from tutors we discovered that using multiple texture sheets would cause an increase in draw calls in the engine, which in return could cause the game to run slower. So I had to rethink and just decided to finish my unwrap in pieces and in the end combine them to create the larger texture sheet. This was easy enough, I just had to resize groups of unwraps to make them fit in their respective sizes.
Finally I got a bit of feedback to end this week. The chainsaw bits, which I had already textured looked a bit flat (to no surprise to myself, since they are literally just flat colours), so my tutor suggested adding a bevel to it in photoshop to make it pop out more, which is a good idea, so I will add that next week and see how it turns out.
On top of that we talked about how I was going to go forward and texture my gun and it turned out that I didn't really have a plan. I don't tend to create plans as I prefer experimenting on the actual model rather than planning out my designs on paper, but it soon became evident that this was needed. So I will have to do a bit of thinking and throw together some pictures to plan out what my design is going to look like when it's textured, which hopefully shouldn't set me back too far.
While I'm currently still on track with my work in regards to my own schedule I also feel that 1 week isn't really enough for texturing, so I am slowly starting to feel like I am falling behind a little, even after catching up a lot this week and managing to get my unwrap finished. I will have to focus a lot to get this project finished in time. At the same time I am also a lot more motivated now that I have finished the unwrap, as that stage always seems to drag on a bit, so hopefully that will enable me to work a bit faster. I can't wait to see the outcome of next week!
