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Game Engine Devlog Part 5 - 3D Models

"The ceramics teacher announced on opening day that he was dividing the class into two groups. All those on the left side of the studio, he said, would be graded solely on the quantity of work they produced, all those on the right solely on its quality. His procedure was simple: on the final day of class he would bring in his bathroom scales and weigh the work of the "quantity" group: fifty pound of pots rated an "A", forty pounds a "B", and so on. Those being graded on "quality", however, needed to produce only one pot -- albeit a perfect one -- to get an "A". Well, came grading time and a curious fact emerged: the works of highest quality were all produced by the group being graded for quantity. It seems that while the "quantity" group was busily churning out piles of work - and learning from their mistakes -- the "quality" group had sat theorizing about perfection, and in the end had little more to show for their efforts than grandiose theories and a pile of dead clay." - from Art & Fear by David Bayles and Ted Orland

Now that I have a 3D world I can interact with I need some models, the problem is that my experience in that area is little more than sticking textures to stretched cubes. So I went through an online Blender tutorial, brainstormed the models I need, and set myself a challenge of creating a 3D model every day for a month.

That month is now over, and I'm happy with the results. This was an enjoyable and fulfilling process of taking a lifetime of memories of buildings and re-imagining them into something we can see. I found the best quality models to be the ones I created side, front, and isometric sketches of before opening Blender, and that drawing with the mouse is not working for me. I can't consider this finished as many of these models will require touch-ups and in some cases a complete rework, plus there are more models I would like to create, but now I have enough to get started on the game logic. When I come back to this, I'll do it with a drawing tablet and without the strict requirement to create and texture the entire model in an afternoon.

(1) Recent demo

(2) Models in order of creation