Weekly Update #7 - Bad week
This one will hopefully be a really short update, because I don't really have much to share with you. I'll talk a little about coding and the small progress I made this week, then about 3D and that's pretty much it, because I didn't do much, being busy with digging in the garden outside.
I will, however, share the small progress I made in Blender. Things are going quite well, even thought they take time.
Once again I'd like to thank @fitinfun for all the support and encouragement, it helps a lot!
Now let's start talking about coding!
The simplest way to describe this week's coding experience is by saying that I didn't learn anything new.
Last week I mentioned how I was trying to learn ES6 and how I was kinda failing, but not really. This week I realized I didn't know almost anything from what I learned last week, and I had to relearn everything.
To give you a better idea of what ES6 is and why I'm having trouble learning it, let's just say that JavaScript is like English. I spent time learning how to properly speak it and write it. Then there's ES6 - still JavaScript (or, in this example, English), but with some extra features and modifications that are supposed to make everything better.
Sure, it's still English, but it's like I'd suddenly tell you "Hey, see these long and complicated words? Yeah, they will help you write better, so learn them, even though you don't yet understand why!"
That was my experience with ES6. It's still JavaScript, but it adds a set of features and changes to the language that took me a while to "accept" and understand.
The good thing is that after spending a few days reading articles and watching some really interesting videos, I finally understood ES6 (or what was being taught on FreeCodeCamp) and I finally see why it's useful to know and use it.
Sadly however, that means I didn't really get to work on anything else related to coding. The last "project" I mentioned last week that I should've worked on received no attention from me these days.
But, I'm not mad. The fact that I actually understand ES6 and I see why people want to use it more and more means I made quite some progress and I understood something that will be pretty important in the future when I'll get a job as a web developer.
So, I didn't really waste my time, I just invested it in understanding something important.
Now let's move to the next section.
Here's what I worked on this week:
Actually, that's one of two images, here's the second one:
Obviously, both scenes require some extra work. I need to modify some models to make them better. The book you see on the second image is all purple because it lacks textures. I mean, it had textures, but I moved them to another folder, and since Blender can't find them, it just made the book purple. There's nothing wrong with it though.
I made all that this week, besides writing and learning to code, so I'm fairly happy with it. Modelling those things isn't as hard as finding the right ideas about what I should create for each balcony.
Creating unique elements for each and every one of them to make it look like people actually live in those places is quite hard, but it is doable and I will get it done. The main thing that motivates me is the fact that after all that hard work, things will actually look quite well, especially because of the amount of detail I will add to the scene.
One downside will be the fact that I will have to make some sacrifices when it comes to the quality of every single element. Since the scene is fairly big, I may have to use lower resolution textures and avoid adding extremely small elements (like dust), because otherwise my computer won't be able to keep up with the project.
That's the downside of working on really big projects - they will eat every resource your computer will have to offer. The good thing is that it will look fairly decent, and I'll do my best to make it look good.
After I'm done with this scene, I will start working on smaller things and, hopefully, learn how to make textures myself that will add a lot more realism to everything I make. But until then, I'm gonna focus all my attention on making this scene look as good as possible.
That's it for this week. As I said, I didn't do much because I had to focus on other things outside the house this week, so progress is kinda slow. Hopefully next week I'll be done and I can go back to properly working on both coding and the 3D scene.
Also, I may write a few more "5 Minutes Freewriting" stories next week because I may not have enough time to write other type of articles, so, keep that in mind.
Anyway, that remains to be seen. Right now I have to edit this and then code for at least one hour before working more on the 3D scene.
See you next week!