3D Catan

Our project takes Settlers of Catan and adds features that assist game play. In Catan, it can be easy to miss what resources need to be received. What Assisted 3D Catan does is help with that by lighting up the tiles where resources may be gained. I worked on the 3D modeling portion of the project.
We started by creating a generic tile base in SolidWorks. This tile essentially had the basic components that each part needed to have: a hole for the acrylic rod, indent for the number chit, and the geometry that allows it to work with our road system. This was then transferred to Blender as a base file for all the other pieces. We created a generic geometry node system to generate features on the top surface such as the sheep or trees. To ensure that these features would not be created where we did not want them, we applied a weight paint to the top surface. From there, it was a lot of trial and error to figure out what worked and did not.
Our entire team is very proud of the final form our project took. In the eight weeks that we had to do the we were able to take an idea in our heads and bring it into reality in a very satisfying way. One of the biggest downfalls of the project was that we had four super passionate and skilled people and we wanted to do so much. Many of the issues that we faced were the result of this. If we did not decide to custom make all of our own tiles then the tiles on the board would have been done by week 3 at the latest. Another good example of this occurred during the early phases of the project. The initial plan was to use RFID cards and chips to assign and read values off of the tiles, and once we analyzed the gameplay, we realized it would be more efficient to have the numbers manually input instead. We all took it well and pivoted smoothly, especially Colden, who spent between 10 and 15 hours working on it. We wrote it off as a learning opportunity, pivoted to the new system, and continued working. Another good example of this would be when Rowan was working on the cards, the text came out blurry and the cards were too thin. To fix this, she spent ~7 hours trying different software/different ways of importing text and learned about different text software over this process. We also had some issues with painting the tiles and pieces, which prompted additional experimentation and learning. Rowan and Will had an issue with the paint being too thin, which would cause it to seep through the layer lines of the print. To fix this, they experimented with additional coats of paint below the thinner layers, and Will also used a filament that was similarly colored to the ideal paint scheme. All of these problems were defined and solved over the course of this project, and there was a lot of individual learning that went into producing all of the parts and dealing with all the issues that arose. There are many improvements that the team would like to make to the project either out of pure passion to make the experience perfect or to repair flaws that came up in our testing. One of the biggest was that the storage boxes were just a little too big in some places making it very hard to use the drawer, however they were also too small in other places making it hard to fit all of the cards in the container. The container still served its purpose so when Colden takes it home it is up to him if he would like to make the changes to improve the container. We would have loved to add things like camera vision for dice recognition however our scope was already too large. There is not much we would have done differently if we were to go back to the beginning. We had a very good design process that was able to work through mistakes fast and deliver an amazing product. The biggest thing might be that we should have made the scope just a little smaller so we weren't cutting it so close; however we all really wanted the project to look as amazing as it did and that would not change no matter how many times we did this.