Ye Olde Virtual Reality Dev Blog #5

This week was our last week to get this project completed and it was quite hectic, there were some issues nearing the very end of the project. However even though the week was quite hectic, everyone seemed to keep a level head, stayed calm and continued working hard on the project.

This week I continued working on making sure every one of our 3D models was textured and had an animation. There was an issue with Shawn's doors when we were trying to get them implemented around the end of the project. Whenever the game started the animation would play instantly and the doors once opened, would mostly disappear. I tried talking to Shawn about it but he seemed more invested in messing around with the Catapult games code to deal with the door situation.

I ended up getting my own models skin weighting and animation completed. It took me quite a while to get a hang of the skin weighting, mostly with the short cuts but also just getting the skin weights right so that the animations and skin movements did look somewhat natural and organic. When I started to get a bit of a hang on how to do it, it didn't seem as scary to do, I still need to learn how to get more realistic skin weighting.

Apart from that I was doing a lot of texturing, be it objects for the tavern, weapons and human models. I ended up having to re-texture some of the textures for some of the objects as they just didn't end up looking as good as they could have eg. the coin. I tried to pawn off as much of the item texturing to Aeisha as I did have three human models that I needed to texture, however Philip ended up having to texture his wizard model himself, as Maya's UV's were completely different to his Blender UV's. When I tried to import his model that I textured, none of his animations were working or came with the model.

I mainly tried to have Eric working on putting the Tavern scene together, with myself still having a lot of texturing to do. I trusted Eric would be able to put the bar together and do a simple texture for the tavern walls, floors and roof and he didn't disappoint. He did a great job putting the scene together and arranging some of the items around the bar such as the tables, stools, and mugs. Below is the scene that Eric ended up creating for us;

Later I ended up adding some extra items into the tavern to make it not look as empty. Items such as shields on the wall, some extra mugs on the bar counter and some weapons scattered around the table area. We later added in Matt's model, a 3D knight model that could of easily been re-used around the bar to make it look more populated.

Hayden and Roman worked on getting each seen ready so that they could be loaded with additive scene loading. This is something that I'm not at all familiar with but it allows for people to work on their minigames in seperate scenes and then load them all together into a single scene.

This project was handed in a day later than it should have, there were issues when an individual pushed some updates and it caused a lot of issues for the rest of the project, mostly the character controller and the catapults game didn't work at all anymore. We had to revert the project to the last time it was working well and work from there. The catapult game still technically doesn't work how it should, we made it so that the player can pick the ball up and just throw it instead of using the catapult. We're hoping to get this fixed before the showcase, I'm also hoping Shawn is able to fix the issue with his door as we had to exclude it from the tavern for the time being until it's fixed.