Week 5: In Which Exams

This blog post is arriving a few days later than my usual Wednesday night timeframe, for reasons obvious to those that read the title (Exams). Most of my week was spent preparing for a multitude of exams while working a bit on some assignments and trying to get some asset creation done. I'm pretty sure I did OK on all my exams (at the very least a sixty percent; I tried to mark myself pessimistically so I could be pleasantly surprised). Enough about tests though, what everyone should be here for is to see the progress made on our game PIVOTal, which personally isn't too much because of, you know, Exams.

First things first, and update on my character model. Recently we started using Mudbox to add more detail and texture our low poly Maya models from previous weeks. I did some preliminary experiments with my character, but as this doesn't have to be handed in until the semester's end I can see that I will be trying to learn much more about what's possible and make the best model I can (hopefully 2 million poly's, super detailed, and professional quality). The tutorials have been really helpful and have taught me a lot of new tools that I can see will be very useful in my future.

Beware the Mud Man

Week 4: In Which My Weekend is Programming

So I definitely didn’t write a blog last week, mainly because I didn’t make any progress (I have other classes with other assignments too), so to make up for that I spent my entire weekend programming, flipping through books and finding as much help on the internet I could. Somehow programming kept my attention for at least 24 hours allowing me to learn tonnes about the engine we’re using and get enough assignments done to be able to write my exam. I also decided that, even if it doesn’t count, I’m going to try and do every assignment, just to learn as much as I can about the engine.

A Nice Gross Rainbow Arm

The first thing I ended up working on was creating an arm with each finger segment individually controllable. When I first saw that question I thought it would be really hard so decided to avoid it, but after messing around in the engine I found that it may actually be the easiest to implement. All it required was creating each joint with a pivot in the right place and connecting the scene together, and of course assigning button presses to move each joint. Working in the scene graph here would turn out to help me in creating…

Week 3: In Which I Stop Humanizing Abstract Concepts and Assignments are Completed

Well I didn’t get a chance to play Shadow of the Colossus yet, nor did I attend the Great Canadian Appathon, I just had too much work I had to get done over the weekend (also it was my birthday, so I did do nothing for about a day). I first had to get done some business that took up about an entire day, but explaining that work would do nothing but bore you.

I got a start on some programming work this week, mostly in trying to set up scenes in Maya and getting them to work with physics in the game engine. I have yet to add in interactivity between a player and the game (making it basically a video) but it’s a good start. This way of importing objects, with physics attached, is much easier than what I was used to from last year, meaning we would likely be able to set up our entire game world quite easily.

Watch the ball hit the wall, see it fall. That is all.