3/25/12 - Starting a Successful Building 2.0

After finally coming to a conclusion on creating buildings by finding out how easy it is to move files from Blender to Unity, I started making my first sophisticated building.  This week I was looking for a good tutorial to help me build a good building.  It was very frustrating.  I googled it and could only a few actual good sources that helped me.  Another problem was that some of the sources only showed how to create a specific building: like how one site showed how to create the trump tower in Chicago using an image.  Another problem was that some of the sites would only have instructions for very advanced users of Blender and it seemed like they had been using it for years.  Me, being a beginner could not follow much of what they were saying so I decided to not use it.  I expected this but I was sure I could find at least one tutorial that would help with simpler instructions.   After searching for a while I decided to stop because I was not getting any work done.  Instead I looked back at the two websites that I had used to start with in my first blog post.  After looking through the wiki page wikibook page for blender, I could not find any such tutorial.  But, in the blenderguru site I was able to find a great 2 part tutorial that started from the basics: http://www.blenderguru.com/videos/high-rise-building.
So I was off.  The guy doing the tutorial had obviously been very experienced with Blender, but he broke it down very well so I can understand.  The end product also looked very good and professional.  I started mirroring every move he made in the tutorial.  Since I am more of a beginner, I was only able to get to the part where he created the building and made the balconies by indenting the building.  This point was at the 7 min mark in the video.  I am going way slower than him, but I am making more progress on a good building that I have with any other tutorial so I will be sticking to this. I am excited to continue working on this part of the project.

3/15/12 - Having to Research

Since this is a senior project that my friend and I are working on, we are being somewhat guided by the teachers at my high school, H-B Woodlawn.  The actual working of the project for almost all other seniors begins in May for 3 straight weeks, but since our project will be much more time consuming, we are working on it now.  After submitting our idea of a frisbee computer game, the teachers wanted us to make sure that we will have no technical difficulties later.  So, the first possible difficulty that I have not looked into is how to import objects from blender and how it exactly works.  And, to my delight, it is very easy.  All I have to do, according to the Unity website for it: http://unity3d.com/support/documentation/Manual/HOWTO-ImportObjectBlender.html, is save blender file in the Unity project file and it will show up.
Finding out that importing the files between the two 3D animation softwares was so easy, I have made a decision that would make my job much easier and more efficient and will be better for the game.  I will make sophisticated individual buildings, houses and trees in blender, import them to Unity and just duplicate/copy-and-paste more of them in Unity.  This way, I can concentrate and creating higher quality objects by just focusing on one.  This should also not slow the game down which I originally feared if I tried to have a setting of sophisticated objects.  I have somewhat scrapped my simple buildings, and am just using them as a launching pad to better things.