VR Development Diary Entry #2

Blender

Intro

My first foray into modeling with blender was retrofitting the whack a mole game for oculus. I can't say it went terribly well, it worked, but had some weird seams, a horrible flat surface, and other glitchiness. I also wanted to create a nice indoor scene but my brick pattern for the wall (this was just a cube!) wouldn't apply correctly on the walls. What's going on?? Why can't I just download a program to instantly understand a skill when I would like to use it like the helicopter in the matrix?

The udemy course I mentioned in the previous post is great in the fact that it teaches the blender modeling as well as the unity side for every mini game - but the whack a mole instruction came with a pdf, while none of the rest of them did. I was having more luck following the pdf since I could go at my own pace flipping back and forth. Besides, I'm getting a real hankering to play skeeball at this point and create my own skeeball machine!

I had a period of time coming up where I wouldn't be able to wear the oculus, so I decided to really settle in and start off with the blender donut series. Andrew Price's blender donut series seems to be all the rage, so that's where I started, naturally.

The donut tutorial took a few days off and on to get through, was super high quality, definitely recommended. Andrew focuses on hitting the high notes of all the tools - you don't get too deep with modeling, but scratch the surface of everything, and get a lot of practice with the tooling, keyboard shortcuts, and such.

Here are a few shots of my work of art while it was in progress...

Texture painting

Shader setup for the donut surface

Coffee cup

The end!

The biggest takeaways for me at this point -

• Face orientation! Easy to get wrong and it leaves you with holes in your model
• UV Unwrapping - finally mostly understand the idea here. This is why I couldn't put my brick material on the wall!

Back to the arcade

With my newfound skills I went back to skeeball. I mostly scrapped an attempt at modeling I had started, and tried to keep the model really clean this time.

Not too bad!