Daily Update 27

Today I literally spend the whole 9-4 working in Blender. I've pretty much finished all the texture, however I imagine some will be changed around during the rest of this development, for example- the stairs are only temporary until I can understand how to make actual stairs rather than just a slope with stair texture. Everything is looking pretty good, though the day wasn't without its falls.

During texturing for this part of the game, Blender crashed and I had forgot to save.. which mean't doing it all again = royal pain in the ass. The process is fairly simple, but each wall had to be sized one at a time, which means a lot of zooming, rotation and scaling to get things to match up right.

This wall was re-edited in Photoshop this morning after some helpful tips from Gary regarding tiling and texture in games.

The top half of this wall was cropped in half and stretched over to remove any prominent lighting on the photo, then the image size was changed to 1024 px for both Hight and Width (standard size for gaming texture). Now the corridor looks quite sharp- it's not perfect, but the lighting will be dark, so there's really no point in spending to much time trying to perfect it at this stage.

One of the more frustrating parts of this process was trying to match the black strip on the bottom and the yellow strip in the middle with the other faces- it required a close up view and patience, this is why it was so upsetting when Blender crashed and I had to start again. However I am use to frustration such as this so I composed myself in good time (after pulling out my hair and dying a little inside) and was able to crack on. If anything I knew what I was doing more so the whole process went much quicker than previously.

Other issues included faces with multiple materials- it seems I had added 3 different materials to one wall during my learning stages and that caused a bit of hassle- however once I figured out what had happened, I was able to click on the same wall and see the extra materials, then of course removed them leaving the one I wanted.

After doing the lower corridor I went back upstairs and straightened up the textures in that hall way.

Thanks to Gary showing me an easier way to add texture on the door frames, I was able to resolve the same issue with ease when I noticed mistakes on the two idle doors.

 The stair texture is only temporary, but for now this looks okay. There were a few faces I had to separate and play around with to get different textures on, such as the walls between the door and the stairs, but again thanks to all I've learnt about this program so far, it wasn't an issue at all.

Blender itself is not a difficult program, it's just a case of understanding its language. There are a lot of short keys to learn which, without understanding of, makes Blender seems like a very confusing piece of software. The short key I used to separate faces was Ctrl + R after selecting the edges of each side of a wall. This creates a split in-between the edges selected, thus separating the faces.

It's all looking pretty good so far. I'll be seeing Gary tomorrow to go over a few things- next stage is getting this to work as an actual game with an objective.

After I got back home I played around with music again briefly- I'm kind of considering using some of my old acoustic songs but slowed down in a weird tempo to twist them into something eerie for the video clips. I'll load them on my iPad tonight and discuss this further with Chris during our crit tomorrow.