#18 Cleaning up the 3D Model
The name of the game for this week is giving myself a good quality 3D-model to work with going forward, plus a bit of a crash-course in Blender. I’ve worked with Blender on one occasion in the past – I had to create a very particular UV map for a sphere to create a pseudo-360º camera live feed out of some mirrorless cameras w/ fisheye lenses. I think it’s safe to say that that’s not really useful experience to bring to the table here.
I followed the rough instructions from folks in the class to highlight and delete faces that were sticking out. This helped with some of the worse offenders, but there was still the matter of floating objects, and it also left the lower section of (flat, beadboard) wall a little uneven. For the former, I looked up how to delete loose geometry (not a huge challenge at all). For the latter, Booleans turned out to be the way to go. Turns out this is something I’ve done quite often building models in Sketchup, and now I finally understand what Booleans are after hearing Nathaniel and RJ talk about them as (an imperfect but very effective) part of the racing car design process in studio. That was a wonderful moment.
I’ve also taken the chance to better align the wall with the x/y/z axes, and deleted the default camera and light source that Blender starts with – this camera, I realize, was the one inside the .fbx in my first lighting attempt (which was not super useful because of the orange selection highlight that came up whenever the camera was also selected.
In the end, the mesh from the scan of the hall is now cut down to just the useable parts, and I’m looking forward to starting over entirely with this newer, cleaner model into a fresh Unreal project with some better file management.
