Milestone 6 (Naomi)

Overview

For this sprint, we continued to focus on our individual tasks, further preparing for our beta presentation and prototype. I was still focusing on modelling Luna, my goal being to model most of her by the end of this sprint. In the last blog post, I had mentioned that I still needed to quad draw the back of the head, however I ended up being able to skip this step entirely. The helmet covered the back of the head, so there was no need to quad draw it. Below are a series of images showcasing my progress:

I imported another model I made a few months ago to reference the topology as I needed a refresh on how to do it properly, but did not want to follow a long tutorial. I haven't modelled a character in a while, so looking back on my previous work helped with that uncertainty. I also found Maya's sculpting tools to be very helpful for getting things to look the way I wanted in a quick way. For example, the puffed sleeves did not match the reference image very well, but I was able to quickly alter them with the grab and smooth brushes, which was much more efficient than moving around edges and verities manually.

Here is a larger image on what the model currently looks like:

I was able to meet my goal of getting most of the model finished, the only things missing now are the frill at the bottom of the dress and the bow at the top. I aim to get both of these things done, UV map and texture the Luna model and import it into the game (it likely won't have animations for the beta stage). I also plan to update the placeholder enemy models that I made for alpha prototype, which should not take as long as the Luna model since their designs are a lot more simple. I aim to get at least one final enemy model done and they can be recoloured and scaled for beta as placeholders for the final models that are not finished yet.

Here is also what our Trello board currently looks like. We added some more tasks to keep us on track on for the beta presentation and prototype. Most major tasks are still in the same section due to them taking longer, but we have made progress on them:

Challenges

While I was modelling the body, it started as a cylinder. At some point I smoothed the mesh so that it would have more details and be easier to shape into a body, however I forgot to delete the faces at the top of the cylinder. I deleted them when I noticed, but due to the smooth, the hole ended up looking like this:

This was an issue because I needed a circular hole to extrude the neck from, otherwise it would end up looking like this strange star shape.

Successes

I was able to fix the issue described in the challenges section by deleting the ring of faces that formed the strange hole, creating a new cylinder that matched the number of edges of the new hole, combining the two and then bridging the two shapes together. I was then able to smooth out the mesh a little bit to get the desired shape for the neck.

Another success I had was with the hands. In the past, hands have taken me a very long time to model. They usually take just as much time, if not more to model than the rest of the character's body. However, I was able to speed up this process a lot by taking the hand from the model that I was using to reference topology and modifying it. I deleted the bumps and cuff from it, since it is a glove, connected new faces and a cylinder and finally smoothed it out with a sculpting tool, making it look like a human hand rather than a glove. This ended up saving me a huge amount of time and I was able to produce something that looked like the references. Below are some process images of adjusting the hand:

Hours spent

In total we spent around 20 hours and 40 minutes on this sprint:

I spent around 9 hours modelling Luna.

Zineb spent about 40 minutes adding VR functionality and 4 hours modelling the ship control panel room and 4 hours working on the puzzle.

Sumaiya spent around 1 hour on colour switching functionality and 2 hours on the logo and main menu UI.