Gart230 Blog- Week five, UV-ing models

This week did not go quite as planned, I had hoped to move the environment in its entirety into unreal engine this week but once I had moved the models across and attempted to build lighting that the lightmaps being made did not line up with the models in the slightest. I quickly realised that this was due to the fact that I forgot to UV unwrap the models that I was creating as I was modelling them and thus despite having the scene almost entirely blocked out, and in some cases having assets which were moving more towards their final state, I was a good chunk behind where I was hoping to be as none of the models would work correctly in engine in their current state. As a result of this the project has remained rather dead in the water this week as I was forced to go back over every model I had created thus far and UV them which turned out to be very time consuming.

I realised the issue during Tuesdays lecture and had hoped to have it rectified by the end of the day but underestimated just quite how much work was required to get all of the assets into a usable state and even by today I have a couple more assets that need to be unwrapped before the project can be moved into engine. Part of the reason for this taking so long is my relative inexperience unwrapping models as this is still one of my weaker points as an artist and if there is anything that this incident has taught me its that I need to unwrap models as they are being created as this makes the process significantly easier and that It would be in my best interest to go over the content available on the learning space in relation to UV unwrapping in order to optimise my unwrapping workflow so that if an incident like this were to occur again it wouldn’t be as much of a time sink allowing me to resuming progress on the project much quicker than I was able to in this instance. despite this set back I feel confident that I can get the remaining assets unwrapped over this weekend which should allow me to properly test the block-out of the environment in unreal engine over the next week and hopefully I wont encounter any more inconvenient issues. All in all whilst this setback is incredibly frustrating it hasn’t completely derailed the project and has highlighted some fundamental floors in my workflow that I will need to correct moving forwards in my studies and into my future career.