Week 5/6: Practical Work and Distractions

The last two weeks have had me pretty well occupied with Software Engineering. The Alpha for my immersive environment there was due and so I was spending most of my time in unreal building out mechanics and roughing in an environment to use those mechanics.

The upshot of this is that it should all be reusable next semester as well as for testing and demoing the results of my 3D design Research Project.

It also gave me an opportunity to test out some assets made by others and look at how they are modelled and the textures applied. I used a bunch of the free Kenney 3D Assets as placeholders for the environment and looks at them they have a similar simplistic style to what I would like to achieve and they use a very simple color map to texture all of the assets in the pack.

An interesting thing about it though is how it uses a gradient for each color. Luckily they also give a nice little rundown themselves on Mastodon about how this color map works and it sounds like its right on what I was doing. On a side note, Kenney also has a cool 2D sprite to 3D model creation tool for $3 that I will definitely be looking into for a quick way to make 3D voxel type models in the future.

Following on from the Mastodon post I found a guide on YouTube going much more in depth on using Simple-Gradient-Textures-for-Models and I think that's my winner for the effect and technique I've been looking for all along.

The rest of this week now will be applying this and seeing my results. Stay tuned!