A Rather Overdue Update

This has been rather overdue. As we switched to submitting .pdf updates directly to teachers I will freely admit that the blog updates have fallen by the wayside for me so this will be the catch-up since the last update on this blog. In regards to winter break I spent most of it relaxing and recharging for the final push that will be next semester. The big update we decided is to shift focus on making a trailer for the anthology rather than attempting to make the full game with the time we have left. While I am saddened by this decision I completely understand as it will be the thing we end up submitting and we wanted to focus on making that the highest quality product we can. The following are from the progress checks I made directly to faculty:

Production Update

Over the past month I have been working on several aspects of the Train of Thought production. The most important has been the advance in pathing on the main park scene, I have created several paths that lead to the main hilltop, the next step for the pathing is to re-time the path to the script and dialogues and find a good length that balances the story and gameplay. I also have made level 1 to near complete models for various background objects within the park. Due to the previs that approached I have not completed the UVs for most of these meshes and plan to do so within the next two weeks as well as finishing or touching up the meshes before handing them to texturing. The other development other than previz has been figuring out what to do as far as Github goes. Our solution is making our own private git server I am helping to coordinate what we need and getting the spare PC to our coder so he can work on it and then hand it off to the person who will keep it since he lives in the mountains and cannot maintain the internet speed for it we set up a meeting to get the PC to him it will be either next Tuesday or Thursday and it should only take him 1 to 2 days to complete it and then help our volunteer set it up. Hopefully the new server should be up and running by the following week, I also want to get into Speedtree and make some more trees for the park.

Production Check 6

Over the past four weeks I had to shift attention to several matters involving both the project and the ever dreaded midterms. Most notably was getting our GitHub back up and running with the help of our awesome coder Seth. We went for a compromise solution with the personal server as a plan b as when we went over the cost of getting it up we found it was cheaper and easier to simply pay for more space so I said I would pay him for it and that was that. The other thing involving GitHub was our lfs for compression and uploading of larger files which I got set up on my system and Seth got the server side working and we fixed up and made a tutorial of the GitHub pipeline now that it was back up and running. Over the next two weeks I will be splitting between several papers and projects along with this one and over the next two weeks I plan to jump back into speed tree and unreal to get my second gen pathing and replace the last of the fill in gray trees with new trees while the sculpt team works on the main tree.

Moving ahead

Over the past four weeks Seth and I have finally fixed the GitHub for our project and we redid some of the instructions to set it up with the large file compression of Git LFS which allows us to commit large file changes without issue. As of Thursday a good amount of our group have re-set up GitHub with this setting with little issue. I have UVd the meshes for my park scene and sent them to be textured which I think Cameron is doing in mixer. After this I got back into SpeedTree and began to familiarize myself. For the rendered scene I want to finish two trees of which I have completed on and got it into unreal along with grabbing various textures from megascans for the other trees. Lastly I will touch up pathing and the foliage for the memorial scene and the park in general.

Progress Check 8

Over the past few weeks I helped with GitHub and getting new foliage into the scene as well as getting some of my stuff organized. This week was very minimal as far as output, I had to switch focus on other classes mainly finishing a paper and beginning research on another. I also had some computer troubles that needed to be resolved which took a good chunk of time. Most of my output was helping with others GitHub and seeing what we needed as far as getting an executable set up. Over the next two weeks I plan on getting personal stuff organized for the faculty review and personal reel as well as retouching the foliage and trees from the main park level and doing a higher res version of the tire swing that pairs with the willow tree that will be the main tree in the park scene. The computer trouble hindered me the most for output but also getting research and various readings done helped with that as well and most importantly getting my paper done is something that was unavoidable.