Final Project, Week 4

It's time for another weekly post about my final project in this course. I've had a lot on my plate this week, and have not been able to devote as much time to this one as I would have liked, which is why the post is a day late. That's okay, because yesterday, I made up for lost time, and I feel like my portion of the project is complete. Today,  I took some final renders, and will be getting together with my teammates to create a full scene with all three of our buildings. Once that's done, we'll port it into a Unity game engine, and see how it looks in real time! Super excited for this!!!!

Yesterday, I completely overhauled my textures. I choose a lighter sand color, as opposed to the pink-ish clay, for my adobe. I resized the textures, in order to maximize the resolution of each piece. I re-touched the windows and doors, adding some highlights and shadows. I  also recreated the bump maps, to make the darker patches in the material really stand out, and allow me the best control over how prominent they are.

Here are the final texture maps, each of them are 2048 x 2048 pixels:



and here are the bump maps:



Next, I deleted all of the individual shaders that I had applied to each object, and applied only two shaders, one for each texture map. This will significantly help in rendering, particularly while running in game. After that, I had to re-apply the UVs, which is how the program knows where on the object the texture is supposed to be. This was surprisingly less tedious than I had anticipated, as I only need to make some minor adjustments in scale and placement.

Today, I added some more lighting to the scene, so I could take some better shots. I came to realize, however, that there are some distinct lines showing up between some of the planes in my scene. I spent about 45 minutes trying to figure out the best way to remove them, but even after combining all of the pieces into one object and forcing the edges of the planes to become one, it still didn't seem to correct the issue. I'll be asking about this, but I suspect it is possibly a part of the process which will be discussed in future classes, which I won't be taking!

With that being said, here are my final scene renders, before we combine everything into one:





Next week should be the completed Maya scene, and if I can swing it, a video of exploration in Unity!