Week 2: Blocking out

Module: GAR106 environment art 2

Brief: “Model, texture and present in UE5 a Victorian three-storey terraced building with a shop on the ground floor facing the street.”

House: Gryffindor

Plot number: 16 (corner)

Week two: Mon 30th Jan to Sun 5th Feb 2023

To help me get started, I read through the “Overview of blocking out and setting up the grid” mural* in order to ensure that my workspace in Maya was set up in a way that would allow for smooth transitions between Maya and Unreal.

To begin with, I attempted to use three separate cubes to form the ground floor although this quickly became unwieldy, so I decided to restart with one cube and try to utilize Booleans instead to ‘cut’ one of the corners off and form the three sides I needed. I then ran into an issue with my model turning green and had to troubleshoot it with the help of a forum thread on Stack Overflow**, eventually deciding to re-do the UV map and then reapply the lambert texture, which fixed the issue.

Both incidences required me to rethink my workflow and find workarounds on my own instead of relying on someone directly telling me what to do, which informed the rest of my block out stage and encouraged me to not be worried about trying something different to get more effective results.

Proportions were checked throughout the process using the scale man mannequin 3d model that is available on the Learning Space, especially for the stairs and door; Victorian style doors often have a great deal of space for the doorframe or an arch so I wanted to ensure that I would have space for those features later on.

REFERENCES

* Games Academy. DATE. 'GAR106 - Blocking out in Maya and Unreal'. Mural App [online]. Available at: https://app.mural.co/t/gamesacademy5502/m/gamesacademy5502/1674857938258/3d49a80772c64064da082c9940195999ca929c06?sender=6aaf7429-d23b-440c-a27a-fd5ca5ce8655 [accessed 13 April 2023].

** DREAMER, Day, JAZZ, Andy. July 2021. 'Why character's face automatically converts into green in Xcode?'. Stack Overflow [online]. Available at: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/68325782/why-characters-face-automatically-converts-into-green-in-xcode#:~:text=Green%20surface%20usually%20means%20a,this%20texture%20in%20SceneKit's%20Scenegraph%20. [accessed 13 April 2023].