Heavy Things

This week has been focused on modeling. Specifically on modeling the objects that are supposed to fall on the player in level 2-the heavy objects.
The ideas we tossed around for heavy things were a safe, an anvil, an anchor and an elephant. I would have liked to make a piano, but it seemed too complicated for such a small part in the overall game.
It is difficult to keep in mind that these models are supposed to be extremely lo-poly since they are not the emphasis of the level. While I want all of the models to be detailed and perfect it is not what this situation calls for. Understanding moderation seems important.

The safe was easy to make since it is a pretty standard shape. It was the first "heavy object" that I tackled and finished it quickly. I tried to move onto anvil afterwards. In the end anvil did not communicate what it was very well so I put it aside and will most likely return to it in the future but for now it is out of the project.

 It took several attempts to get the anchor right, but it was a fun process! It does not look 100% right, the top seems like it should have a hole in it, but I think it will serve its purpose in the game excellently. I want to go back later and give all of these models amazing textures, but that is not the most important thing right now. Priorities.

The elephant was the most challenging. The body, legs and tail were simple, but getting the trunk, head and ears to look "natural" took many attempts. It still does not look perfect, but it has come a long way. Elephants have weird necks. Also making the trunk look natural is like making a tentacle look natural. After staring at this model for a long time I realized the head wasn't prominent enough and the ears were in the wrong place, so now you are looking at the closest to accurate version.

Is it problematic that all of the "heavy objects" are gray?


Goals for next week:

1. put these objects (and other necessary objects) in level 2
2. work on the camera movement /how much of the level the player should see at once 
3. finish the educational textures 
• a side note on this
• it turns out unity uses textures that are powers of 2 and if your texture is not that size it stretches and distorts it to that size
• since I did not want distorted textures I had to figure out what size to make them 
• so I took a break from working on the actual textures to write a quick program to list powers of 2 and tell the user if an input number is a power of 2
4. make a complete list of what NEEDS to be finished before people can play test the game 

so next week I will be back to tell you that I accomplished all of these things! (at least that is the plan)

cheers!