Sprint 3 Overview

 Sprint 3 has concluded, and It's been rather interesting to say the least. I finished a whopping 34 points this sprint, with none them really feeling inflated either.

The firehouse was the first building I textured. Part of my assigned work was to make a alternate version of every building, for how it looks after a earthquake.

After this, I worked on the modular apartment buildings, which entails a concrete, brick, and cement varient.

The vast majority of my work was regarding texturing, with these 3 modular apartment buildings, and their damaged variants, making up the bulk of it.

Each building had one base component, three mid levels, and a roof. Each piece having 2 separate textures for their normal and damaged variant; totaling 10 textures per modular buildings.

I later optimized them so each modular building used one UV, with the damaged variant being another, so in total their were 6 UVs for the 3 modular apartment buildings.

Due to the distance the player might be seeing the buildings at, I had to over exaggerate some of the damage, specifically on the roofs, to make it very easy and clear to the player which building had been affected by the earthquake.

I tried adding finer details in some areas, without being to extra, as sometimes fine tuned arears begin to look worse on models that are duplicated everywhere.

The roof is arguably the most important part, as the player's camera is in the sky, it will be the portion the player will be looking at the most.

The last variant for the apartment building is the plank one. which had some slight initial issues. The UV map for it had a slight warp near the base, my band aid solution was to independently mask and then rotate each panel to counter the warp.

The before and after

It took some significant time, but in the end I was able to resolve the issue using that method. The original models also accidently used 3 separate UV maps. This was caused by the modeler accidently adding multiple lamberts. I fixed this issue in Maya, and other then that, they did a exceptional job UVing and modeling the apartments.

The apartments will eventually be exported in grayscale, with a Hue slider of sorts being implemented in Unity. This way we can have multiple color variants of the buildings, with out needing to make additional texture maps, greatly optimizing the storage size of the game.

The Unity based coloration change will be needed, since as of right now, there is planned to be over 500 buildings on the map, most of which will be this apartment building (and a house model currently being worked on).

I am now quite officially the texture artist of the group, I still needed to do some modeling, but for the most part the majority of my workload is texturing the models of others. This greatly increases the efficiency of our group, as I can do texturing work significantly faster then others, giving them more time to just focus on modeling instead. One of the model I did do is a vehicle wheel. I pitched the idea the all are vehicles would be more optimized if we just did a single universal wheel.

This will utilize high poly baking in order to increase the quality of the texturing to hid just how low poly the wheel is.

The road, though being just a plane, is incredibly important, as it will be one of our most duplicated as used assets, I had to make sure the patterns on it would still work after the model is tiled and placed along itself.

I then modeled a group of four modular props that are intended to give diversity to the modular buildings, being placed on some, and on differing locations to give variation.

The radio antenna and window washer support were some of my favorites to model and UV, both of which use a insane amount of UV stacking in order to be optimized and use a higher amount of texture density.

The AC unit, despite the low poly being just a cube and cylinder, was able to get pretty detailed from the high poly baking I did. I did the original texturing for it last sprint, but it had to be redone due to UV changes on the shared map.

Lastly, I textured the flag. This might have later variants in the future, being in SF, I might pitch the idea of having a pride flag, or even a California State Flag.

This concludes the majority of the work I did for Sprint 3. All of it was in regards to 3D art, with around 2/3s of my time being spent on texturing my work and the work of the other 3D artists. There were only 2 minor issues I had that I mentioned above, and besides that everything went very smoothly. I was able to show to my group how well and fast I could texture early on in the sprint, which changed workflows significantly to the point where I will be doing upwards of 90% of the texturing for this project. I'm really happy with this, as though I believe I am good at modeling as well; texturing is something I genuinely enjoy doing, and don't really get burnt out on.

I know this blog had significantly more pictures then text, but most of the work presented I do not feel needed large amounts of exposition. For Sprint 4, I will be texturing modeling work completed by the three other 3D artists from this sprint. To wrap it up, this sprint went very well, and I did not initialy conceive of completing 34 points, but I was able to convince the lead that I was able to do that amount of work in one sprint. This does bring up a interesting dilemma though. I am doing double the workload of everyone else, but of course receive the same amount of points and credit. It might be better off if I do a traditional amount of cards next sprint (around 15), as there is no incentive to do more, and I could spend that freed time on other projects.