Week 30

 This week I put everything into engine and began messing around with a few things.

A few weeks ago I wanted to make a steam animation for my hot drinks. I thought that I would do a hand drawn 2d animation. After producing the animation I thought it look absolutely dreadful and threw it in the bin. I realise I probably should have kept it, but it is what it is, and I also realised I could easily make a better animation in the unity engine anyway, so no biggie. 

I also began playing around with lighting within the scene and found a few issues.

My first issue was to do with the low hanging lights being rendered later than other things in my scene. This meant that the light would look as if it was turning on and off as you walked forward and backward in my scene. I realised this was to do with rendering distance so I clicked on the light which was a point light, went to the inspector tab, set the render mode o important rather than auto and the issue was fixed.

Following this another issue with lighting came up, this time to do with my skybox. I decided I'd use a free skybox since there wasn't much point in me creating my own as you cant really see outside that far, so I thought it would be nice to just have a good looking skybox. I downloaded a pack from the unity asset store "FREE Skybox Extended Shader" by Boxophobic. After changing my skybox to the daytime skybox I suddenly realised.... I hadn't set my objects to static. This was a big deal, since now my screen had a lovely tinge of blue but also because now my scene would remain that way until I properly baked my lighting... And I also forgot to create a second set of UV's for the lighting. So I will create a second sec of UV's and then I can set all my objects to static so that the lighting generated on them is what it is intended to look like.

I found my transparency wasn't working because I had messed up the textures.

I also found some of my planks were a bit off and were too high.

After fixing these issues, I finally unpacked the lightmap in blender and then used it within my scene.

The lightmap went horribly wrong and I wasn't totally sure why. The lighting in the scene works better without baking the light map anyway, so I'm going to leave the lighting as it is.

Other issues arose, such as my door animation rotating on the completely wrong axis for some reason, the same happened to my counter door.

I also realised that my sizing's were all wrong, so I took the scene into 3ds Max and x reformed it. I later found out you can easily do this in blender too.

When I reimported from max the bean sacks then looked all blocky, so I had to reimport from blender after fixing the x reform again. Essentially I had scaled my objects and hadn't set them back to 1,1,1 scales on the axis.

After that the animations worked nicely and looked clean.

However, my ceiling fan animations looked jittery, so I went into the animation tab, changed the window to 'curves' and then selected all points, right clicked and set them to auto, this meant that the animation going from the last frame to the first would not slow down, and instead continue as if it were one animation.