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.

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.