This week the DTSF team packed up and headed to Hamilton College for the DHI Conference. It was a Digital Technology Conference. Three schools attended the conference: Gettysburg, Hamilton, and Colgate. We brought the most modeling students out of the other schools. Hamilton was more interested in Unity and Colgate was using 3DSMax, an architectural program, to create their projects. The leaders of the Conference were both experts in Unity and Blender. It was a very inspiring experience to be able to learn from them and I hope to be able to use them as a resource for further questions I have in the future.
As far as the project Hoang and I were assigned, our goal was to recreate a Spanish theater from 17th century Madrid. This project was a very amazing experience and I learned a lot from it looking back. It taught me a lot about team collaboration and project workflow. The most important lesson I got from this was that things don’t always go to plan.
The first step was to figure out how we were going to split up the work. Both Hoang and I have spent a lot of time on Blender but neither of us have collaborated with another person on the same blender project. So we decided to split the theater into two sections. I worked on the front stage and side seating while Hoang worked on the back part of the theater where the people entered from. Both parts were complex in their own way. The theater has so many different levels and areas of seating at some points it was confusing. For me the backstage area was the most complex part for me because I never worked on an interior section of a model that is also attached to the exterior. When I designed the interior for Penn Hall, I created the interior separate from the exterior in a different Blender file. However while I was designing the backstage it was less intimidating that I originally thought. Hoang also had a difficult task. My section of the project was mostly symmetrical. This allowed me to use the mirror tool in Blender which meant I essentially only had to model half of the front which made things simpler. Hoang, however, was not able to use this because the entrance building is not symmetrical enough to get away with this tool.
After each of our base models were done, we began to go back and add more detail to the model. This included things such as benches, bleachers, banisters, etc. Once the specific model was made for each detailed furniture item, we then had to use the historical information Chris from the Spanish department found regarding how much furniture there was and where it was placed. Getting measurements to be as exact as possible was the most important part of this project. Especially because Hoang and I had to eventually combine our projects. This meant all of our measurements had to remain consistent between the two projects.
After the first day I quickly realized that the work was going to be much more than can be done in a week. So Hoang and I started to work nights in order to stay on schedule. However, even with this extra time, we still weren’t able to finish within the week. We were able to finish the majority of the Blender model excluding the textures.
Going forward we still need to properly transfer the Blender model to Unity along with the textures. There are also things in the model that need to be improved. There are also aspects to add in the future such as a realistic play interacting on the stage.
