Jeremy Reid - Week 7 Milestone

This week Colter, Amanda, and I met up at campus to continue working on our game. Greg, unfortunately, couldn't make the meeting, so the rest of us focused primarily on attempting to fix non-script related issues.

I was unable to get Amanda's karts working correctly as intended. I think that there was something that I was missing or forgetting to do. It could even possibly be a script related issue. I don't think it's a problem inherently with Amanda's karts, I just think its something I'm not doing right on my end. In any case, we need to figure out the issue soon.

This next part of the milestone I share partly with Colter, as we both spent a good deal of time on troubleshooting the issues regarding the importing of his trees. Apparently Unity has a bug where imported models from 3Ds Max are 90 degrees off from their original state in certain situations.This issue can be predicted if the preview or icon of a model is displayed as sideways before dragging it into the scene. Dragging the model into the scene manually is not the problem, as in this case it will right itself up in the correct position. The issue comes with trying to paint the imported models (Colter's trees) on the terrain in mass by using the associated function in the terrain editor. When this is attempted without implementing our figured-out solutions, the trees ended up being painted sideways as shown in the image below.

After extensive frustration, Colter and I figured out a workaround to this bug. Colter compensated for the off-rotation of the tree in Unity by rotating it 90 degrees off in 3Ds Max and then applying a "reset x-form" modifier on it before importing it again.

This worked, but it also introduced a new problem, as shown in the image below. The lower half of the trees, when painted on the terrain, were actually below the surface of the ground.

Fortunately, we fixed this problem as well. On a hunch I recommended Colter to try manually changing the pivot point of the tree in 3Ds max to be at the bottom of the trunk. He did this before applying our other fixes....and it worked!

Now, when I paint the trees using the terrain editor, they are upright and no longer sink below the ground.

To sum it all up, Colter and I managed to work around a potentially frustrating bug that otherwise would've forced me to place down trees manually one at a time.