Late post

So I just woke up from my long nap or should I say slumber since I went to bed at around 7 pm. Today was the end of a long week, tomorrow I'm going to be missing my group meeting since I signed up to do Pure Motivation volunteering. We will be doing beach clean up at Cocoa beach near the Kennedy space center where shuttles are launched. I need to also email Rodney, the data structures course director about an interesting c++ occurrence with diamond inheritance. I will post more about that in detail after I formulate some ideas and play around with it.

This week has started out very slow and I've realized in all it hasn't really been all that bad. Since I am in-charge of rendering, I am currently working on the render engine. My tasks currently that I need to finish are 2D Image rendering, static geometry exporting, and scene exporting. All these tasks are around the corner with the completion of my render engine and I definitely feel pressured to finish it since we have no visual representation of anyone's code in our game until I get this finished. I started asking around with the other team's render leads and they all seem to not have rendering as well or at least not all of it done. So since everyone doesn't have rendering, people have to resort to using console to see if their code is currently working properly. I should have 2D rendering and the engine working at the very least on Monday. I need to really push through and spend quality time this weekend. Also I need to finish up and finalize my resume and website to start visualizing what it might look with side projects that I have so Rob Coble can review it when I go in to see him on Tuesday morning.

A major break through also happen as well. Since Ben, our lead character artist was gone for army reserves service, Lisa and I had to figure out how Ben was able to export his character in smooth skinning animation to get it to work. After many iterations and the help of two very nice GP staff members, Anna and Dan/Darren?!(can't remember) Marunowski, we were able to figure out what worked and what didn't work. We were able to get Lisa's coconut breaking animation effect into our game and Derek was able to get his catapult into our game as well. Lisa, Derek, and I am very happy so the three of us (or at least I) have good morale going on right now with a side of pressure to finish the rendering engine.

We did pretty good on our tech document and our EP and AD didn't notice our mistake in leaving in the oppressed asian guy title given to me by Phillip. Another thing I forgot to mention was that I was able to fix our texture UV problems looking messed up. The problem didn't lie in our textures UVs but our camera being messed up. It was rendering our objects mirrored so to correct that I had Derek Hughes help me by negating the x-axis and orth-onormal-inversing the camera's regular matrix to get the view matrix. I need to let Justicar know this, so he can fix that in his camera class since we will be using his and not Wendy's from directx, which we are currently using. I got to sit down with Derek today in open lab after 5pm and talked about scene exporting and static meshes. He covered some good topics today that I wish my artists were there to help me remember since they need to know this stuff. I think the main advice I got out of scene exporting was that I need to use custom attributes a lot so that my engine can recognize a lot of different things in how meshes are going to go into our game. There are two ways to add custom attributes in maya, 1 is in Object mode which adds custom attributes to the transforms and the other is in Face mode which adds custom attributes to the Mesh. When were building our level which we will in maya and were doing mesh instancing (making copies of one mesh), using attributes on the transforms means the attribute will be unique to that mesh so we can specify things like, "this mesh will have a specific texture versus the rest of them, or we won't check collision on this specific instance of the mesh". Using attributes on the mesh itself means that attribute will be shared across all meshes of that type. So think of it as a static variable in a class which has to be shared among all instances versus just having attributes on the transforms which are unique to that instance. I have about 2 hours now since its 3am before I have to get ready and start leaving to go back to the campus to meet up to do pure motivation.