This is how I feel after I finish any project. It doesn’t matter what it is or how big or small it is. My projects take so much of my attention that when I’m finished it takes a bit for me to figure out what to do next. Yes, even when I have several things lined up to work on. Because, now I have to choose which one will take over next.
The project I finished was my puzzler project for the Udacity VR class. I finished tweaking the look of the dungeon and surrounding scene and hooked up all the code for the puzzle to work just in time for my colleague at the day job to play test it for me. It was close because testing was Friday and I had to turn in the write up by Monday. It all worked out and I spent Friday night doing the write up, and choosing pictures, and getting the videos put together so I could embed them in the post.
I learned a few things in the process. I found out that I need more information before I use my Adobe Media Encoder. It didn’t work quite like I had hoped. But maybe the next time I put together an animation from 3DS Max or Maya or whatever, I might want to use it to encode the video before I upload it to YouTube. I also learned how to use OBS Studio to capture my game play video. That took a little work but not too much and it worked like a champ. I like that I can set it up to only record the one area of the screen. That’s kind of cool. So I used OBS to record me playing through the dungeon in the Unity editor since recording the game play on the phone would have looked really ugly. Not that I know how to do that. Fortunately that’s not really necessary.
So. In case you missed it over the weekend because you were out helping ‘Thor: Ragnorok’ stay number one at the box office, I posted the complete write up for the Dungeon Puzzler here on this site. It’s the next article down. There are lots of pictures and even some video.
One of the things you may, or may not, notice in the video is the sky and ground look a lot different than they did before. It was always my intent to add some sort of ground and to change up the skybox. That basic blue sky look just wasn’t doing it for me. So before I finished it all up and published it to my phone for testing I took care of those. First I found a nice space type of skybox and downloaded it to use. Then I used a basic terrain component in Unity to create the ground and then I adjusted the height in some areas to create mountains. Then I found a couple of textures online that I liked. I started to import them and my computer crashed. I forgot to save after adding the ground and the new skybox so as soon as the computer came back up, and I added those back, I saved. Then I tried again and it crashed again. It appears that one of the textures has some bad meta data and that is what kept causing the crash. After starting again, I downloaded just the one.
Of course since I have the lights under the room I had to lift everything off the ground a little or the lights would not have worked. At that point I had completely changed up all the light maps that I’d already created so I had to create all the light maps again. This took over a half an hour and it pegged my CPU at 100% usage probably half of that time at least. My computer is no slouch and it was still working really hard. The final result looks a bit like this.
And here are a couple more screen shots that I took while putting together the write up.
I submitted my project for review and got back a response a few hours later. I was done with the Dungeon Puzzler. I didn’t need to make any edits or corrections. I have my mentor and my sister to thank for that. They both reviewed it before I submitted it so that I could make it the best I could. I am very grateful for their help. While my mentor was able to review it for completeness for the assignment my sister was able to review for clarity. She didn’t know anything about it so if she wasn’t able to understand the write up then I hadn’t done my job.
And that was my week and my weekend. And yes, I had time to start or return to something else if I had been able to decide on what that was going to be. I wasn’t able to commit so I took the few hours as a refresher in between the projects and just goofed off. No, I was not out helping “Thor: Ragnorok” stay number one at the box office.
Next up, I start the next project. It’s a bit more involved and I have a feeling it’s going to take a lot more to come up with something really good, especially having seen some outstanding examples from other students. You will be seeing plenty about it here so stay tuned.