July 29th - Cooking 2019 Skit Complete

A bit of a rushed project at the end and could have spent a lot more time polishing everything. Still, I feel that uploading and sharing it out is better than just having it languish as an un-finished draft forever. Although I'm sure I'll look back at this and cringe in the future... 

Here are my thoughts after finishing this learning project:

• Gotten more comfortable with the Blender/Unity and make was able to progress in the project much faster.
• Blender
• Learned UV warping / Bone location constraints /
• Exporting animations
• Figured out the issue with exporting animations from blender into Unity. Wasted a lot of time wondering why even though I stashed the animations they weren't appearing in Unity. Turns out I need to select and highlight all of the animation key frames for them before I export from Blender. Makes sense since I select the option where it only exports what's selected. This might make it so I can really start working from one singular master blender file for future projects instead of the way I'm splitting them up right now.
• Rigging
• I added in clothes to the models and now understand why you would want to delete the non-visible underlying objects and mesh's. Removes weird clipping issues and artifacts. I had wasted a ton of time rigging the models and trying to get all of the objects to deform together.
• Unity
• Learned the basics to Trail Renderer and got some more experience with VFX particle generator creating fire. I do want to spend more time learning how to use both to create effects in the future. 
• Unity Physics - I had manually animated the falling speed of the objects but next time I might just try and use Unity Physics engine to do it. That way the falling speed is more natural. 
• Turning off the environment lights seems to work alright as a replacement for fading in and out of scenes. Still needs a bit of work to make it darker but is a usable solution for now. Lighting overall is something that I can probably improve a lot on
• Timeline - Much better organized than my last project and was able to separate the animation out based on scene
• Falling animation can probably use the rigid body physics of Unity so I don't need to animate it. 
• Audio - I can probably improve the audio a lot by just using one single track. That way I can adjust the volume and quality of all sounds. It'll be an additional final step that I can add to projects.

What's next?

I need to learn more about how to do better modeling. Better modeling will help both rigging and animation so I think improving my modeling skills will result in a larger overall improvement. 

As a result I've signed up on CG Cookies so that I can take their 3D Blender courses. Specifically, I'm interested in their course about good topology for modeling. 

However, after taking a look at all the courses that are available, I might spend the time to go through all of them. If I do, try to take all of the courses then then this may very well end up being the focus of both August and September.