This week, I set out to perfect my UVs and began to finalize my textures. My goal for this entire project was to put what I've taught myself into action. I'm trying to avoid using anything that requires an expensive license, relying on Blender for everything I can. What a learning experience! Don't get me wrong, I really love Blender, but its shortcomings became apparent this week.

The first major task I've been doing in Blender, which I normally do in Maya, is my retopology and UV unwrapping. As difficult as Maya can be, it really comes down to time. With Maya, I've already built the knowledge and familiarity to retop a model pretty quickly and have become quite efficient in my UV unwrapping in Maya as well. On the other hand, I've never created a retop and set of UVs I've truly been happy with.

The first big "aha" moment for me was getting the hang of deleting edges or faces, then filling those, or just going directly to using a manual edge-cutting tool. This made the light at the end of the retopology tunnel fully visible. This allowed me to have full control over the topology. Don't get me wrong, I'm sure there is a better or more efficient way to do the same thing, but in the moment, this allowed me to get what I needed and it was pretty quick.

When it comes to UVing, the breakthrough was a lot faster. Everything I've made is hard surface, so I marked all my edges based on the degree of the angle, then deleted anything that was unnecessary or just repetitive. My biggest independent goal was to try to texture all my assets in Blender as well. This was deceptively hard and ultimately, after over 8 hours, broke my Blender binge.

I was able to get my assets textured in Blender and was actually pretty happy with some of them, but my lack of familiarity with Blender's node-based texturing system really put me in my place. The biggest problem was that things would either look totally different in UE5 or would completely break. This is the single problem I spent the most time on this week and is ultimately sending me back to Substance Painter with my tail between my legs. I'm not totally defeated, but I'm out of time to try new things and have to go back to what I know for the final polish of all my assets.