Indiana Brown ✧ University Blog

My presentation came second to last again, and while I think it went well, I did get overly nervous while explaining and skipped on important, clarifying details. Nevertheless, the ideas seemed to be popular, with enthusiastic feedback left in the Nodenoggin:

After the presentation, we began discussions of potential teams. This was the part I was most nervous about. Not many of the pitches had a lot of 3D work, and those who did planned on covering the 3D work themselves. Ideally that meant I worked on my own project, but nor did I want to work on it by myself; preferably I wanted one or two teammates with me to help.

Fortunately I didn’t have to work by myself! My classmate and friend Josh said he wanted to join me!

We immediately started hashing out a five week plan based on the remaining weeks we had left on the course via Miro. I appreciated this deeply, because I like to have a plan and a to do list to keep myself and others organised. This was going to be an ambitious project after all.

We started work on the overall plan and the level design, as these were the most important features we’d need to work out. After some back and forth, we came up with a basic, 3-room house, as well as a few puzzle ideas, and how to guide the player between said objectives. Josh in particular had a lot of excellent ideas about the type of house it could be, and who it belonged to, and how this could factor into some fun worldbuilding and gameplay.

We also listed by importance the animations we’d need for the dog in red notes.

Josh and I met up in the computer labs to refine out the design of the house, as well as the puzzles.

The house design was based on one of Josh’s relatives, and we oriented the furniture so it hopefully wouldn’t clash with the camera rotations (although this would need to be properly tested once we had a greybox).

Additionally, it was decided I would make and texture the dog 3D model this week, while Josh would rig it, as I already had most of a 3D model completed already. I would also figure out a way to texture the dog with fur. I already had some idea of how I was going to do this with a fur shader package for Unity I found a few weeks ago, however I had no idea if it would actually work, much less look good.

Meanwhile, Josh would work out on scaling a greybox using our level plan, and rigging the dog when I was finished modelling it.

Our guest lecturer this week unfortunately couldn’t come in, so I spent today working on the dog mesh. While I was fairly happy with the body shape (I just needed to tweak some proportions to make it fit a Westie instead of a Yorkie, as previously planned), I wanted to redo the head and give it some nice paws. For today, I just focused on the paws. I separately modelled one out, then duplicated it four times, and fit the topology to the bottom of the dog’s four legs. Now my Westie had nice, detailed paws!