Week 3: 3D Research Project Outline

I'm a bit late to this one due to some personal reasons but we're still here and trucking along nonetheless. I've just finished and submitted the outline for the 3D animation research project after some delays.

It was mainly combining and expanding on what I had already been talking about and looking into here for the last few weeks along with my Obsidian notes which I have on my phone and machines to sync any thoughts/links/wip research. The bulk of my time once I finally sat down with this was spent finding some solid research to back up what I am doing since that is probably my weakest area. I'll make stuff until the cows come home but ask me to write anything academic and we've got a problem.

I also spent some time this week on the software engineering side of things. The assignment is mainly focused on functional testing in Unreal so for now rather than focusing on level design or environment design I'm just going to build out all the mechanics I know I want to use, build tests for them and then see what time I'm left with the see how deep I can go with building them into an environment.

So far its just a bouncepad with some tests for the velocity calculation and application but having the project created and something in it makes it a lot easier to come back to and pick away at whenever I have a few minutes. Link to the repo here.

For the practical side of 3D I've made some progress with testing out some of the techniques linked in last weeks blog post. I got some promising results from Normal Map painting without too much effort and tested out some UV unwrapping and shaders.