Week 4: Post 2

 Is there anything that is holding you back in your experience? 

    So far I have been working with Maya to create just the landscape of my environment. But I realized today, after creating the base of my landscape, that Maya was not going to work the way that I wanted it to in Unreal Engine. In order for me to put the foliage (grass, sticks, rock) on it, I would have to create a heightmap, which is very different than my Maya landscape. I couldn't find any documentation where I could just take my file and make it into a heightmap so ultimately I resorted back to my first process of doing it in Unreal Engine.

    I am not fond of rendering the base of my landscape in Unreal because it isn't going to look exactly how I wanted it to. It has a sculpting tool that I feel is not very uniform and you have to do it all yourself. Not only that, but I fear that it may slow down the engine because of how many assets that I have running in the program. Right now I feel when I take one step forward I go two steps back. It's not that I didn't expect it, but I spent an entire day today trying to figure out how to establish the grounding for my landscape. I was afraid that this would happen within the rendering of my environment but I understand that this is the process with research and you have to go back and forth to achieve what you want. I know that this is going to happen multiple times as I go through the entire research process; so I wouldn't necessarily call it holding me back but it makes it somewhat difficult. Another reason for this is that I don't communicate with Vicki as often as I would like to.

With this being said, tomorrow I am hoping to look at more documentation that can guide me in making my meshes (used for the coloring of the environment). And I'm going to look for assets that are going to look nice in the environment. I'm going to be as productive as I can be and use my time to the fullest. I'm just hoping that I can get this first environment complete and the next one will be a lot easier for me to do.