So, after all those previous tasks, I finally wanted to understand UV-mapping. Fortunately, some members of the guild of writers – especially dendwaler, who was very patient with me – helped me to understand, how it works.
You basically have to “unwrap” an object, to have the different faces of it projected to two dimensions. Then you add a material, then a texture, and then you move and resize the faces of the objects, so that the texture is shown properly.
When you’re done, your object will be textured correctly.
On this screenshot you can see, that my skills with UV-mapping had gone a big step forward. Still, the textures have been improved and altered a lot since then, and my UV-skills with them.
I added another, bigger room behind the small corridor, which I dubbed “Lab I”, my first laboratory.
In this second room, I began to position some objects I made with my newfound skills:
One of the first pieces of furniture was a simple, selfmade shelf.
I used this basic model in various ways later.
Was really satisfied, how it looked.
After modeling and texturing this water basin, I made my first tiny steps with ALCScript, a script language that helps adding interactivity and some kind of dynamic effects.
In this case, it was a so called “waveset”, which adds an animated plane, that looks and moves like fluid water.
The next thing I really wanted to add, where sounds.
If you run through your age and hear nothing, it is a strange, unreal feeling.
When you add footstep regions, another dynamic effect configured with ALCScript, it suddenly feels a lot different.
I added two footstep regions. One of them for the whole age, sounded like walking on stone. This reagion envelops almost the whole age, because I use stone as a material mostly for the floors.
Nested into this huge region, there are various smaller footstep regions with different sounds – in this case, I made one for the water splashing sound, when you jump into and walk through the water in the basin.
There are quite some different sounds available, from stone, dirt, water, mud to wood.
It may seem like a small addition, but it adds to immersion a lot more than one would think!
Thanks for continuing forward in such a step-by-step manner!
If I can offer a couple suggestions?
– If you’re going to talk about UV mapping, a lot of newcomers won’t have any idea what that is. It might help if you gave some explanation, and an image of the UV editor window in Blender. Or if this is something you plan on discussing in a later post, just tell people not to worry about it now, that you will explain UVing later on!
– Same thing with sound regions: tell people how a sound region works, maybe show an wireframe image from Blender of how a sound region encompasses the area within which the player will hear a specific sound.
It’s easy to forget that many – maybe most – of the people who will read this may not have had any experience with building for games!
Thanks for your kind words!
I actually plan on doing some in-depth posts about some of these topics, for now, I only want to give a summary of my learning process and some hints and nudges.
May be I should add some links to tutorials, if people who are beginners want to learn about the topics I mention before I post the more detailed postings…
I`ll think about that.
Thanks for your feedback, I appreciate it!
R:”I actually plan on doing some in-depth posts about some of these topics, for now, I only want to give a summary of my learning process and some hints and nudges.”
E:”Or if this is something you plan on discussing in a later post, just tell people not to worry about it now, that you will explain UVing later on!”
Hehe, I think I left out some of my thoughts when I answered to your comment.
I´m not sure yet, how detailed these posts will be, so if newcomers want to learn about what I write, I should better link them to the proper tutorials, so that they learn it faster and better than with the limited information I could provide. ^^
I will add the respective links to fitting tutorials over the next days – once I will have asked at the guild of writers, if this is okay, of course