Fall Week 5: Proposals, Doubt, and Resilence

Proposals

This week I presented my project proposal. Of course, now that I had officially pitched my project and was actually building it, I was noticing things that I needed to change all over the place. The day before pitched my project I was going over my design document one last time, when I realized I was trying to do too much. I had already eliminated my initial list of "wants" from my project, but I hadn't gotten rid of any of my needs. I wasn't leaving any room for cutting- and while I wanted to tell myself I could do everything, I knew that not allowing for scaling down if I need to was going to be a huge mistake. 

Doubt

Anyone who has ever worked on a huge project that they have invested a large amount of time into knows that there are always moments of panic, doubt, and fear. This was one of those moments.

Suddenly I felt overwhelmed, it was the day before my proposal was due and I didn't know if I would be allowed to make changes. How would I even make changes? I had done so much planning and things felt as though they were already permanently set in stone. I had already scaled down my idea three times, and I here I was realizing it was still too big. 

I spent the next day in a slump. Proposing my project to my class felt like watching myself dig my own grave. This was my thesis, everything I had been working towards at school was all leading me to this moment, and there I was setting myself up for what was surely going to be failure. 

Resilience

I walked home from the computer lab the night after I proposed my thesis, and spent the entire walk trying to  find a reason to have hope. I kept telling myself, "I can do this," but being more of a realist I knew there was no way I could realistically get everything I had proposed to do done, while keeping both my jobs, passing my other classes, and have it not look like trash.

But I felt stuck, and no matter how many times I went over the situation in my head I couldn't figure a way out. We get in trouble if we don't finish our thesis and in the past I have seen dedicated and hard working students be told that they can't cut(these were small things that did not jeopardize the overall project-as I have seen other students try and change their thesis entire in the middle of it which should not be allowed for obvious reasons) from their thesis at all and that they just have to work harder. In my mind not being able to make cuts is bad project management- but as students who are graded for our projects we also have to adhere to the decisions of our professors.

In the end I decided to do what I have always done in these situations, I decided to go down fighting no matter what. Maybe it was hopeless, but if that's my only option then it is the one I am going to take. so I picked myself up and jumped into modeling. 

Whitebox

I don't know if it's possible to be a realist and an optimist, but even though I felt the opposite I told myself I was going to figure this out.

My fake optimism paid off, because while I was blocking out my white box I suddenly conceptualized a solution. I say conceptualized because it was the same as the first time I pictured the scene except I had a knew idea. 

I realized that if I made the train tracks part of a tunnel way below further below the shops, I could not only eliminate some of the more worrisome parts of my thesis, but that I could easily cut them out all together if push came to shove and things needed to be done. Rather than being a train station it would simply become a subway/metro which was something I was initially considering at the start of my project anyway. The train tracks would not be visible because they are underground. I will easily be able to make a floor model for a central courtyard should the track need to be removed.

 I got to keep the basic layout of my scene which I was already dedicated to as well as trim off several assets that were required simply because I was going to have the station on a higher level. In terms of project management it was a perfect solution because it did not damage the overall outcome I was trying to achieve and did not require any massive changes to my plans. 

UDK

Once I had that finished, I was ready to bring it into UDK to test out the proportions. I was a little nervous about opening up UDK for the first time in almost 2 years, and spent a little bit of time just playing around with the interface before I even attempted to bring my model in. I was surprised to find that even though I was missing a lot of the more specific details about using the editor, I was still familiar enough to pick them back up rather quickly. Although, I will admit I was able to ask one of my friends for help whenever I got stuck on something so that made things a lot easier.

Things do not go entirely smooth either, as I immediately ran into an issue with my white box model when I brought it into UDK. When testing out the door size I had chosen to see if it worked, I discovered that the character in UDK was two grid sizes taller than what I gotten from my research. 

I was at a complete loss. I had looked at multiple resources on the web when determining that the character was 6uu(UDK Units) tall during my research. All of them had given me the exact same data for character height and grid set up, but there I was in UDK with a character that was very clearly 8uu tall.

At first I didn't believe it and double checked my maya files to make sure I had the right dimensions there, which I did. I double checked to make sure my geometry was translating to being the same grid size in UDK, which it was.  I made sure that I had UDK set to its default settings, and still nothing had changed.  I even went back to the resources I had gotten my information from and none of them said anything about why this might be happening or even mentioned that it possible would. All the numbers they said to use were the exact same as what I had used.

It looked as though I would have to adjust all of my scene's measurements, which I was prepared for since that was the whole point of checking in the first place but I had hoped that my research had been solid enough to prevent the need. But before I could do that I had to figure out just how tall the character was.

With the help of my friend, Ben, we made a mock character out of barrel assets and attached it to character in the game(the character it self would not show up even though Ben was  sure he had the right settings for it) and set up a camera to record it during game play so we could figure out exactly how tall the character was. From this we were able to determine that the character was set to exactly 8uu tall.

I was slightly distraught over the situation and the fact that I had apparently messed something up, and decided that there had to be something else I could do. So I did the only thing some one in my situation could, I turned to the internet. And as luck would have it I very quickly found my answer.

It turns out that the character is not set to the UDK default character setting of 6uu by default. Something which none of the websites I had gone to for research had bothered to mention. Luckily I found a blog that not only explained it, but told me how to fix it.

 All I had to do was go into the world properties and set the game type to UT game. Which was of course the obvious thing to do once I read it. 

I am so glad I decided to look into it further, because it saved me hours of work in terms of refiguring out the scale of my level.

And now that my character and world was set to the scale I had planned for, I was relieved to find that many of the dimensions I had chosen worked. However, I also found that there were a number of things I had also gotten wrong. 

The walkways I had made were far too narrow and completely unrealistic for the city scene I was planning. The height of the bridge as well as the depth of the train tracks was not deep enough. I also found that because the train station was now on the same level as the Lux and the Mc Quinn Outlets that it did not stand out as much as I wanted it to. So I decided to make it's structure larger overall. 

The image on the right is the whitebox model after I adjusted the different proportions. I brough the new model into UDK and found that it was a vast improvement. 

Silhouette Pass

I had actually planned for the majority of my time this week to be spent of trying to figure things out in UDK, but I got the hang of it so quickly that I was done after several hours. I don't like to waste time, so I got a head start on my silhouette models for the scene. Things are going really well now that I

Things are going really well now that I've managed to get back on my feet and I'm looking forward to keeping up the work!

Time Tracking:
1hr 00m: Whitebox modeling
2hr 00m: Whitebox modeling
2hr 00m: Whitebox modeling
0hr 30m: UDK Refresher
1hr 30m: UDK-Whitebox testing
2hr 00m: Whitebox adjustments
0hr 20m: Whitebox adjustments
0hr 13m: Checking adjusted whitebox in UDK
4hr 05m: Silhouette Modeling
2hr 035m: Silhouette Modeling

4hr 32m: Silhouette Modeling

1hr 49m: Blog Post

21hr 14m Total