Sprint 5 Overview

Sprint 5 has wrapped up! and it has certainly been the most wild of our sprints so far. There was some rather significant issues that popped up, which we only caught within 2 days of the sprint ending, so the majority of my time was actually spent doing damage control and fixing the problem that appeared. Ill go into further detail of what the entails, but even with that large issue, I was able to get some textures done.

I was unfortunately sick twice during this sprint, and likewise missed half of our meetings, but I was still communicating and updating by group on a daily basis. 

The first thing I started to work on was texturing the modular ground tiles.

These were actually not made by modelers, and instead by our head programmer and game designer. They are sized specifically in a way to create the terrain in our game. Currently the terrain is simply made of colored cubes. These are actually labeled and coded in a way that they can all be automatically switched over to these new textured assets once imported.

The main concern with these was that they would be place directly next to each other, so the textures would need to tile very efficiently in order for the materials to blend together with the respective pieces; cube, slope, and corner.

A significant amount of time was actually spent created the UV sheet for these models despite their simple geometry. Again, primarily to help ensure they would tile well. 

By resizing the different shapes based on the largest one, the cube, I stacked all of them as efficiently as I could, in order for them to share the same relative texture. This was the proof of concept I created using this UV layout:

You can see that stacking the 3 respective shells on top of each other, allowed them to tile super efficiently, despite geometrically being very different

After that I textured the mailbox:

As usual, the main struggle is that all our models are very low poly. Because of this, I heavily utilize normal maps while texturing. This helps make the screws and letter drop shaft feel more 3 dimensional, despite of course being completely flat

I utilized similar techniques for the dumpster:

At this point I also stopped doing small text. The yellow sign in the right corner should have a warning label on it. It came to my attention that the player will be seeing this from over 300 feet away. There really is no reason for there to be any text, is it will not be legible to the player. Even though the texture resolution easily allows text, it will not be seen at a close enough distance to matter.

Because of the issue I mentioned at the start of this blog, I did not have to complete the entirety of this UV Set as originally planned. I of course still organized the entirety of the map though, as I would not be able to texture anything before doing so.

Now regarding the big roadblock I have mentioned. Our lead was for our last class meeting, and thus I had to directly communicate with the level designer. The different teams normally don't interact, with the lead (in theory) sharing the relative information between the groups. When talking with the level designer, it quickly became apparent that we had been given completely different variables and restrictions to work with. 

This was a massive issue, as it meant none of the models created by the modeling team, were compatible by the level editor built by the programmers and utilized by the level designer. This would have been ongoing all the way from Sprint 1. We obviously don't point fingers, but the lead telling us inconsistent variables between different groups, combined with them believing in not having any group meetings outside of class; indirectly led to this issue.

Without the lead being present, I talked with the other modelers and the level designer to formulate a solution. My plan was to resize, re-orientate, change the pivot location, and change the world space location on every single model we had done. This would be a band aid solution, but would make all our models compatible with the level editor. 

Due to the fact that I change and move all the UV maps when created a UV set, it meant that every single model that had been textured, could only be fixed by me. As this versions created originally by the respective modelers would not have the proper UV maps. This meant that roughly 80% of the existing models could only be fixed by me. With the rest of the models, all untextured, being resolved by the people who originally made them.

This was a pretty big speed bump, especially with the temporary loss of our lead, but we worked together and communicated well and resolved the issue completely on time

This was by far the most hectic of any of our sprints, and what was the most painful was the fact it could of been completely avoided if the group utilized basic communication. Regardless, we are in this as a team, and we fixed issue to the best of our abilities with the variables at hand.