2/28/12 - Successful Buildings

Today, I continued working on what I started last week: a basic high rise building.  In my last post, I expressed how I did not want to make a simple building, but as I researched the making of such structures more and more, I have realized that making multiple sophisticated high rise buildings will be very time consuming and will indeed hurt the overall speed of the game.  It would probably not be an issue if my partner and I used Blender exclusively, but we are planning on using Blender because it is easier to make surroundings, then convert it into Unity.  This is what will slow it down.  So, I made some buildings with rectangular prisms and and small planes that I manipulated into small squares, to make windows.  I made multiple and tried to make it look like Ballston, which is the backdrop of Washington-Lee's field.  I plan on using some more effects, though, to make it better without slowing down the overall project.  Plus, there are other sides of the field including the school itself that I will be working on in the coming weeks.

Intro to Blender - 02/23/12

Today, I am starting the project of making an Ultimate Frisbee computer game which I am working on with a partner.  We will be using a combination of the 3D animation softwares Unity and Blender to create this game.  For now, my partner is focusing more on the ultimate frisbee aspect such as the people of the game using Unity, while I focus more on the surroundings and background using Blender.  We are also jointly working on the physics of the frisbee itself and help each other on the other person's part of the project.
The first background that I am making is the area surrounding the Washington-Lee High School field.  This includes a lot of buildings and some trees.
To start off, I tried creating a high rise 'building' because there are many surrounding the field.  I thought that I can manipulate cubes into rectangular prisms and just line them up next to each other to make it seem like buildings. What I thought would be a good idea at first turned out to be obsolete.  But, it seemed very simple and would look very boring in the end product.  So, I decided to look on the internet for a better way to make buildings.  In the process I found two websites that seem like they will be useful in the long run: http://www.blenderguru.com and http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Blender_3D:_Noob_to_Pro
I started looking at the blenderguru site but some of the tutorials seemed very advanced.  It was difficult for me to even begin.  Instead, I turned to the wikibook on Blender and I found out how to make windows very easily by just creating small planes and putting them throughout the rectangular prism's exterior.  It is tedious but, for the time being, seemed more practical at the moment.  For now I will do this, and maybe eventually (hopefully in a couple weeks) I will have enough experience to make more realistic buildings.  I have to keep in my mind though that the background is not as important as the gameplay and if I do make more complicated buildings, it might slow the game down.