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

I also did some work on taking some things from our asset list and making some models (and a few UV maps) for all of them. Seeing as most of our assets are less organic and more mechanical they didn't take too long, and I can easily see getting all of what we listed and more into our game (the hard part may be getting good textures). I made some gears, boxes, lights, buttons, grates, ladders, pipes, and much more.

This scene could use some better organizing 

Programming wise it was more reading code than writing code, as I was using that to study for my Exam. I know in programming I find it hard to remember all the functions and what I need to write (Somehow I didn't know about intellisense until this year, I don't know how). Although I'm great at modifying existing code to do what I want; I managed to turn an inverse kinematics system into a forward kinematics system. I do think looking at all this code as well as other things prepared me well for the Exam (I don't think I need to keep capitalising this but I will anyway) but some things I just didn't know, regardless of studying.

So that's what I got into this week, next week I'll be off to MIGS, and, considering most of our team is in one hotel room, we'll probably get more work done there than during regular school. I'll also write some stuff up about the presentations I go see, mostly about the art side of things, I'm looking forward to it.