Reflection of game art, Week Twenty Four

This week I continued with modelling the truck for the zombie pickup truck project. At this point, At the beginning of the week, I had already finished modelling the truck, however needed to fix some problems before I could move onto unwrapping. After modelling my truck and collapsing the symmetry modifier, I found hidden verts and engons that need to be removed. Once this had been fixed, my triangle count was at around 5,600 and the limit was 6,000, so I had a small amount of triangles to attempt modelling the interior. First I modelled the car seats with a box, then swift looped a line at the bottom so I could extrude the poly out to make an 'L' shape. I then chamfered the edges and moved around the verts to shape the seat until I was happy, then cloned the seat. I created a floor using  a plane so that the player can not see under the car, then created a dashboard using a cylinder which I deleted half the cylinder with the ends, I moved the verts until I was happy with the shape and then moved onto making a steering wheel. At this point I started going over the triangle limit, so I had to remove the wheel and leave the interior finished as it is.

Now all the modeling was complete, I could move onto unwrapping. I started with the interior and then the car body. As the vehicle had the symmetry modifier on it, I could use this to mirror most of the car while unwrapping, and place on top on each other to save space as they are the same shape. However I could not do this for the whole of the model, as it would be to obvious in some areas, creating a 'butterfly print affect' such as the bonnet and the 'Toyota' sign at the back if the truck. So I had to unwrap these parts fully. Once I had finished unwrapping one part of the car such as the interior or exterior body, I collapsed each unwrap uvw to a map channel number, so that I could assign the texture to the right map channel later in a multi sub material. I also render both interior and exterior body maps to a jpeg file, ready to be textured.

This week we also had a lecture on a blog assignment which is a 2000 word reflection on the first year, including the personal action based on our last review and how I want to develop forward to what career path ibwish to take. We are expected to used secondary reference materials, such as journals, books and articles. I thought I could use some reference as a comparison to my game art work, such as the character project in relation to low poly character model such as Lara croft and team fortress. I also decided to start from the beginning in September and use previous blog post and look through them to help me understand my development through the course and how my thoughts have changed, which I can talk about different aspects I liked and disliked.