Milestone 3 (Naomi)

 Overview

This week, my team members and I focused on further progressing in both the proposal document and alpha presentations. We finalized some of the sections in the proposal document, as what we wrote last week were rough drafts. Some rough descriptions were also added to our presentation slides which will be further polished throughout this week. We also got a GitHub repository started, accepting the invite from Zineb, who created the repo. We've done some initial planning on what we want to get done for the demo in the alpha presentation, and getting a repository started was the first step.

My focuses this week

We are starting to get to the point where we are splitting up the work more and working on tasks independently. Along with updating my assigned sections in the proposal doc as mentioned in the overview, I was responsible for creating a basic wand model in maya and adding an animation to it. Here is the final result: 

This is the animation that will be used in our demo when the player attacks an enemy. Both the model and animation are very basic right now, but will be given more detail as we progress in the project. Later in the week, I will add this model into unity and get it to function with our gameplay.

To make the wand, I created the handle using a cylinder primitive, extruding it as needed. The capsule is a sphere primitive with some of the bottom faces removed. I then UV mapped it so that the different parts of the wand could be textured accordingly:

I then created materials in maya, although the final version will likely have more complex materials created through substance painter. Here is the temporary translucent material I added to the capsule (It will look more like glass in the final version, but I needed to be able to see it in the viewport): 

I then added the animation (seen at the start of this section) by grouping the meshes and keying the rotation of the group. This is just temporary, it will be properly rigged in the final version.

Trello Board

We continued to add more things to the trello board as we saw fit, adding items and moving tasks when they were completed. For the first time, we also got to make use of our "locked scenes" section to keep track of when someone is editing a scene, preventing work getting overwritten.

Challenges

I had a problem with Arnold suddenly deleting itself from Maya, despite me just using it last week. I'm not sure why this happened, but it was an issue because I needed it to get the translucent effect on the capsule. Looking it up also was not helping as the complex solutions confused me further.

Successes

After some time, I was able to get Arnold back into Maya, I simply had to reinstall it, which I found out by asking chatGPT.

As a whole, our team succeeded in further progressing in our project. We have a lot more done than last week, accomplishing goals in our proposal doc (finalizing sections), alpha presentation (adding some detail to our slides), and our demo (getting the basics started so that we have a base for the next few days)

Total Time Spent

In total, we spent around 4 hours this sprint. Around 45 minutes planning and discussing what we wanted to do, about 30 minutes on the proposal doc, and about 2.75 hours on the wand model in maya (this likely would have been shorter, but figuring out the Arnold issue took a lot of time)