The past few weeks have been interesting. After getting the group together and deciding the course for our capstone, I realized that their experience in the various areas of game development far outweigh mine. Each person in my group is a powerhouse of either Blender or Unity experience, and it really started to make me feel small. Not to mention dealing with complications with my chronic illnesses, and had a minor surgery (tests came back with no signs of cancer, so yippy!). With all of this I’ve been really getting down on myself in regards to my ability to contribute at this point in development. I’ve not worked with movement, controller input, or asset design before, and seeing them start these parts of development with such excitement had me worrying. I do have to say my team has really been a huge help through these past few weeks. They’ve been very understanding and supportive of my situation, and I couldn’t ask for a better group to working on this project with.
Adapting
I think the most interesting part of the past few weeks is learning the differences between classes and real world work. I’ve been heavily focusing on building the shaders for the game we are developing and there have been a lot of roadblocks. I’ve taken CS457 – Shaders with Mike Bailey, and I absolutely loved that class. I had no problems with any assignments, and found the work to be fascinating. When starting on working with the shaders in Unity, I felt like I was learning a whole new language. Unity uses an entirely different set up when dealing with shaders, yes there are a lot of similarities and at its core its the same, but how shaders are called and ran are very different. Furthermore, Unity has its own engine variables that the shaders access and allow for custom variables which can increase confusion. At first I found moving over to the new format to be difficult, but after plenty of reading and a few helpful videos from Blender themselves. The layers of difficulty started to fall away and I felt right back at home in building these shaders. That being said I still have a lot of research ahead of me. For starters I still haven’t figured out an efficient way to reference object surface normals in the shader, which is one of the more fundamental tools I’ve learned. Then, while I followed a decent tutorial for building the Sobel edge detection shader, I am not getting the results that I would like and I know it can be done better. I’ve seen other edge detection shaders that not only detect outside edges but also capture inside edges.
Getting this far into the capstone, struggles, self-doubt and all has done nothing but make me more excited for the future of the project and our team. I hope this is the start of something that is exciting and fun for each member of our team. When working with Unity and Blender, I feel like a kid again, full of wonder and excitement. It’s exhilarating to work on something like this and watch it come to life in front of you. I can’t get enough of it. Looks like winter break is going to be filled with shader research and learning more Blender and Unity.
