3. Preparing for the Alpha Stage

> November 24

Did the apple/coconut/orange/tomato models and texture this morning. Made a foliage decal but decided it didn't work on the wall the way I wanted it to. Also realised that the objects look bad in game with the lighting the way it is now so would need to change that asap.

The wall model and chest are done I think but I worked on the chest today not realising I had a newer version done at home so I need to combine those now. Also I thought I had uploaded stuff the the drive but it wasn't all there like the textures for coin purse and stuff.

> December 1

I worked more on the character model today and it was decided that the hair and hat could be separate as long as they are weighted correctly in Blender for animation. Owen finished the ship so I unwrapped it and have started texturing. It's been fairly smooth sailing. The plank highlights are going to be the hardest because I tried planar projecting lines for them but it wouldn't work. The planks also look very uniform at the moment so I'm starting to add a hole in the hull and am planning on more extreme wear and tear.

> January 5

Today i worked on the palm tree assets texture which i am very happy with . Our group are preparing for next weeks alpha test which will include a smaller level hopefully with elements of level design and a properly decorated scene.

> January 11

Started a tiling sand and grass texture today and worked a bit more on the UI I had started. Drawing wood is the bain of my existence because I still don't feel like i get it. I just end up doing dark and highlighted grooves with an overall lack of organic personality.

In Photoshop you can easily create tiling textures by using the offset filter and painting to fix the visibly mismatched seams until it comes out with a seamless tiling texture.

> January 12

Today was the due date of our games alpha stage. We are okay with it at the moment but want to add UI now and fix up the level design. Also need to finalise documentation which we need to talk about together as a group.

I worked on the cauldron and bamboo cage texture and also got the trees into the unreal file with their textures. I had to change the blend mode to masking and plug the alpha into the opacity mask part of the material because using translucency like I have done in the past wasn't working - the texture looked as if the normals were flipped and the wrong sides of the mesh were showing up front?

The tiling materials look okay but are stretched in the landscape so Owen and James are looking into that. Level design was supposed to be done for this Alpha but no one did it.

> January 19

I have completed the tiling textures which James has implemented into the game using smart projection to have the grass and rock applied to the cliffs somewhat realistically. The grass tile appeared to repetative at the scale we have it at so I thought to create another tile to overlay the material at a larger scale which breaks up the repetition.