Semester 3, Weeks 1-2

I'm back at Warren Tech! For the first time, I'm in the building working in-person! I'm so exited! This is my first time actually seeing many of my class mates from last year, and I'm also getting to know the new juniors. It's also my first time in this space. It's nice! We have plenty of room at each station, a devoted area for life drawing, a Cintiq lab, and a VR lab. This is a talented and enthusiastic group that I'm happy to be a part of.

These first weeks haven't contained much tangible work; we're mostly just laying a foundation. The first few days were spent on getting to know the space, rules, expectations, etc. Over the weekend, several students prepared project pitches to present to the class. There were a whole bunch. We spent the greater part of three days hearing, critiquing, and getting on board with these ideas. In the end, only three of them were approved. Several game ideas that I really liked didn't make the cut, but that's life. The three finalists are:

• Voidsinger: A 2D spaceship combat sim with physics-based building mechanics and exploration.

• Possessed: A 3D horror imposter game with *spooky ghosts*. Basically Ghostbusters x Among Us.

• Find Emma: A VR first-person 3D horror interactive story taking place after an apocalypse. Your goal: find Emma.

I chose to work on Find Emma. It has plenty of opportunity for AAA 3D work, and four other talented 3D artists. I'm exited to take the opportunity to create neat things and learn new stuff. In fact, I've already started.

After choosing teams, we set up our workstations with all the softwares. I got Blender, I got Maya, I got ZBrush, I got Substance Painter and Designer, I got Unreal Engine 5, I got Photoshop, I got Github. Watchu need? I also took on the responsibility of getting everyone on the Trello, Discord, and GitHub, to get us organized. Then, we spent a lot of time hammering out details. We fleshed out visuals, story and design. That can be a painful process with a lot of conflict (and there was some), but this team has a nice dynamic. There were conflicts over VR/PC, visual realism, story beats, and more. We've resolved many of those.

Generally speaking, I'm in charge of props and textures. On Friday and Saturday, I got to work on some. I made a simple little worn-down crayon with a torn wrapper and two different keys. They're essentially complete, just not in engine (we're waiting on the programmers to get some experience before creating a project). The modeling workflow was pretty standard. I used booleans to cut out the teeth on the keys, and to create the worn-down ends of the crayon. I UVed real quick and sent it to Substance. I tried to use Designer a little bit, but for these purposes, I didn't really need anything more than Painter. The keys were made with lightly edited presets. The crayon was a bit more work. I started with a wax smart material, and recolored it. I then made a label in Photoshop, and made a paper material with the label. I painted a lil mask to look like ripped paper, and that was it. The textures are all exported and stuff.