3d modelling my classroom and games jam

 

Introduction

Hi everyone, in this post I will be talking about the process and my overall experience with 3d modelling my classroom and completing a games jam. The purpose of this is to share my Games Development journey with others and to look back on this myself.

How 3D modelling my classroom went

The steps I took to recreate my classroom in UE5

 

As this was a group project, we both had plenty of time to work hard on our roles making sure the 3d models were as accurate as we could get them and having a map planed out. When it comes to the 3d modelling my teammate got straight on to doing as many models as they could in the time we were given and that was their one goal which they just had to focus throughout the entire project. Most off the steps only affected me as I had to create the project, make world and import 3d models trying to get the map looking as close as we could to the classroom as possible.

 

The first step we took was knowing what our roles in this team were, one person on UE5 and the other 3d modelling on 3ds max so we could get straight onto what we needed to be doing to complete the project.

 

The second step was to gather measurements, luckily as there were other teams also working on the same project, we all shared our own measurements with each other. After this I had to find out the conversion of real-life cm’s into unreal measurements which turned out to be 1cm equal to 1uu (Unreal Unit), this allows me to start rough grey boxing the shape of the classroom with the measurements we had.

 

The third step was to use the mannequin as reference for sizing as the height of the default UE5 mannequin is the same height as a member of the class meaning we can use that to determine if the classroom looks okay in the engine. In the engine the classroom was small by a considerable amount, so some alterations had to be made such as every measurement was shy of doubled to make the room seem more proportional. This allowed me to fully grey box basic aspects of the classroom such as the walls, desks and cupboard.

 

The fourth step was to do some more complex grey boxing and what I mean by this is I grey boxed every small aspect of the classroom which didn’t need to be 3d modelled and then some of the 3d model bits such as computers and windows. By doing this I made the classroom with just the engine itself and its tools meaning when I received all the models, I could replace them with their place holders and the map will look more like the actual classroom.

 

The fifth step was importing the 3d models and replacing their place holders with themselves and then finding materials to texture the room. This is basically the final step when it came to recreating our classroom in unreal, all the models are in and placed according to real life layout and all the textures needed were placed where needed.

 

My final step was a personal choice but as I prefer learning to programme, I wanted to add a little thing at the end which was the ability to go onto a computer and look at a png image of google. You could type into the search bar but only exit works and that just puts you back as the character. And then the last thing added was a door which could be opened and closed, rgb windows and fog for dramatic effect.   

 

The challenges I faced and how I overcome them

 

One of the challenges I faced was learning the new design of UE5 and finding out where every tool is. How I overcame this was spending a few minutes before starting my work to look around the new layout and finding where everything is so that I can get on with my work.

 

Another Challenge I had was learning how to grey box a map and get the right shape of what I was after. I overcame this by messing around with grey boxing and using the settings involving it to try and create buildings and other structure before getting straight into the project.

 

What I have learnt from this project in terms of technical skills and teamwork

 

From this project I have learnt how to build basic maps using the tools just within the engine creating a scene which is decently good for what it is. This skill will help as I don’t like making maps and find it difficult but with this, I can create decent maps for games I make so that I can focus on coding. In terms of teamwork, I learnt how to be more of a leader and not a follower, I can direct more and ask for what I want. I can now be a better team member in the future and learn from what I have done wrong this time not pulling my weight before but now will.

 

My Games Jam Experience

My experience in the games jam

 

The theme for this games jam was Nuts & Bolts, so the first thing we had done as a team was think of ideas and start just blurting out ideas. My experience within this games jam was alright as I was mainly doing most the work and at times got frustrated and unmotivated to do more and better the game. I don’t think the experience was entirely bad as it’s a learning curve for me knowing what I can do and under pressure what can I achieve with my current potential. The game we ended up creating was a fps with a bit of parkour at the very end, and your objective for this game is to defeat nuts and bolts to repair buildings and get to the end point.

 

Overall, my experience wasn’t the best, but it’s been a good learning curve and has/will help me grow as a programmer. This isn’t my first games jam I’ve done, and the others did go better but with these sorts of things it’s never about the winning or losing as it’s all about how I can grow and prove to people I’ve got more to show and can do more. There were some moments in the challenge where I was stuck and had to overcome this such as when I was figuring out true first person and remembered in the end that I could attach the camera to a bone on the mannequin’s skeleton, so it moves with the animations, then its just fine tuning it by playing with the positions of the camera. Another thing that almost got me was enemy movement which wasn’t happening, and I had to in the end search up a tutorial on it but was able to skip to the end as I had most of the things I needed already done. One positive with this games jam is that it made me realise that motivation is almost useless as it comes and goes and is small or big and it’ll end up holding you back, use motivation to start something but use determination and your dreams to push up on to keep working on something that could benefit you later.

 

My contributions and role within the team

 

My role within the team was programmer/level designer/UI and designer, I had a lot to do and not much time to do it, but I put my most into each part but focused more heavily on programming. My teammate was finding sounds/music and coming up with ideas for the game whilst also finding images and creating images for the UI and main menu ect. He contributed as much as could and needed as I couldn’t help him more and push him further as I had a lot to do myself. Before working on the map/materials or UI I first focused on creating the character programming most of the mechanics we wanted to add to the game. After getting the character mostly done, I worked on the enemies and main objective of the game with the buildings and the win condition, the enemies being the harder of the two as I needed a bit of help with them but got there in the end. We contributed as much as we could do to our specific roles within the team and more.

 

The memorable moments and challenges in this games jam

 

As stated, before I faced a few challenges in this games jam such as the enemies, pickup abilities and first-person camera. With the first-person character I was able to figure out the solution after spending a while trying to make it work but failing at every turn and the solution was simpler than I figured as it was just to attach the camera to the skeleton of the character. The next challenge was to have the enemies moving which I did have to get help from a Youtube tutorial which wasn’t my best moment but it’s what I had to do as spending more time on it would have been wasting my time and I would have been behind which puts my team in a bad situation. The final challenge was with the pickup abilities which was ended up being scrapped as didn’t have enough time for problems as was done late into the project as just extra features so wasn’t as important as refining other bits of code I’ve done, but this was later added back at the very end but altered to be simple and there were no time limits this time just permanent buffs.

 

This games jam had a few memorable moments such as many times I just blanked at an obvious answer and later realised and just shacked my head and laughed, there were also moments where the code doesn’t want to work and then the next minute, they do want to work like it changed its mind. Probably for me though the most memorable moment in this games jam was in the final moments of it and I decided to just do loads of work staying up till the deadline to get it done adding as much as I could in them moments.