First Steps
This section of the portfolio is a compilation of miscellaneous experiments and some of my first experiences with industry software
Programs/Tools I have used to make projects:
Unity, Unreal Engine 4, MS Visual Studio, Blender, GitHub, UE4 Blueprint, Audacity, Gimp, Microsoft Office Suite, Google Suites,
and constantly learning more!
Unity:
On the right is my first completed project game project. I use this as a starting point despite it being nothing special, something to show where I was within my first week working in any kind of game development software.
-The first thing I did was create two guns, specifically the pink gun and the low poly gun. For both I made customized projectiles and vfx. The pink gun is a prefab I created using the base gun model mesh and texture found in the assets. I made a new texture with different HDR. I gave the gun the overheating script behavior. I was able to make the gun’s tubes have the correct transparency, revealing the particles inside; something that was poorly implemented with the original prefab guns.
These steps resulted in me learning how to use and manipulate premade assets and scripts to create new and unique prefabs.
-My second major step was me improving my understanding of cameras, constraints, and rendering textures. This is primarily on display in the outside area on the left of the first room. Here I have a camera inheriting constraints from the player camera. I made a small floating eye to show where the camera specifically is. The camera's view is rendered onto a cube model in front of a blue ramp.
Notably the cube itself does not appear in the cube's texture. In fact, the cube's texture shows two sets of stairs that are located behind the cube. This is a small example of level/game design. By showing the stairs on the cube before they are ever directly in view it makes the player aware of their existence without needing to directly see the stairs.
All credit for the models, meshes, textures, scripts, etc go to the original creators of the Unity Tutorial
Besides completing tutorial modules, I spent a decent amount of time learning some nuances of Unity by experimenting. I taught myself about masking, occlusion, constraint components, cameras, rending order, shader types, and more.
On the left you can see an example of this "self teaching". Essentially this is an attempt to make a long hallway appear shorter on the inside. A camera further in the hallway projects its view onto a wall at the entrance of the hallway. Considering I had no idea what how any of these concepts worked in unity specifically before starting, I think this illusion works fairly well.
Below is a collection of objects that I made to better understand render order and shader types. Specifically here most of these objects are shaded as transparent. (All orange and blue colored objects are opaque). Due to the render order, objects are being drawn in front of objects that they are physically behind.
MS Visual Studio:
MS Visual studio is what I've used to for all scripting in my unity projects. As a Computer Scientist, IDEs are what I have the most experience with to when it comes to scripting.
Pictured on the left is a part of the character controlling script from my Brick^2 project. (Yes, line 27 is not lined up how it should be, but there is a reason for it)
This image is cropped from a background I made for this website and other profiles
Blender:
Blender is the main program I use to create 3D assets for projects. Though I am no Michael Angelo. Below are some examples!
(left to right):
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The first finished model I made in blender. [Used in Brick^2]
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A prototype model of a helmet/character. [TBD]
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A collection of materials for future game items. [TBD]
2D and audio:
Because 2D assets and audio make up a relatively small portion of my design process, I am combining them into one section.
Gimp: For most 2D assets such as textures, sprites, UI, etc.
Audacity: For placeholder sounds.
Unreal Engine and UE4 Blueprint:
Currently I am using the 'Unreal Online Learning' website to better learn and create in UE4. I hope to eventually use the website's built in badge/progress system and showcase that part of my profile here.
For now this is the last part of 'First Steps'. Please check back here sometime soon and I will have more to show!