Weekly Workshop
Week 10 Workshop
I created an outdoor scene with falling leaves, where the character is having a campout, but he/she saw someone breakdancing while a fish swimming in the sky. This may because that the character ate some wild mushrooms. I added a fluttering particle system in the scene, which was able to simulate the falling leaves in the site. I also added some furniture and a toilet to illustrate the camping environment. In addition, I imported a swimming fish from unity with swimming sound, which is an illusion that the character is seeing. On top of that, I added a female character who is break-dancing. I also added a global audio with birds singing in the background. I found Styly very easy to play around and has less caveats compared to Unity, but it also has lower quality animation and graphics, and somtimes it craches, especailly when you have some demanding visual effects and animation in the scene. I want to know more about whether scripting is possible in Styly because we could achieve a lot more if we were able to program the object's behaviors after some trigger.
Week 8 Workshop
The link to download APK: https://hncswpy.itch.io/traverse
Week 6 Workshop
Glowing Cube Shadergraph
Shifting Color Gradient.mp4My implementation
Portal Shadergraph
Twirling Portal.mp4My Implementation
The first shader graph I made is a glowing cube. It utilizes the color gradient node and a blend node to mix several different colors and render them on the cube. I made some changes to it by adding a time node and a multiply node, which will shift the gradients, animating the cube with different colors. Secondly, I applied the time node to the saturation as well, so that the color will change across the gradient spectrum. The original tutorial's link is here.
The second shader graph I made is a green portal, which was inspired by Rick and Morty. The original tutorial is in Spanish and the link is here. It uses a Voronoi noise node to generate white-and-black patterns, which are turned into a swirl using the twirl node. Additionally, we use the rotate node to animate the swirl and use the Lerp node to dye the pattern into green. We also added some white-color noise using step and add nodes. The outcomes is really amazing!
Jiapei: I really like how you combine the time node with both the saturation and color. It's very vibrant and pleasing this way.
Titanfall 2
My favorite scene in this game is Effect and Cause, where the player could use a Phase Shift watch to switch between the Past and the Present to reach the final objective in the same building, this means that the player have to work around the obstacles by possibling switching to another reality and then swtiching back. The backstory is that the Phase Shift Watch was worn by Anderson, who went missing in previous mission. Our mission is to recover the watch and figure out what happened to him in a hostile building.
By switching the watch on and off, the scene would be completely renovated and filled with enemy (the Past) or fully abandoned with lots of places unable to visit (the Present). Such action prompts the player to explore the scene fully and finally retrieve the desired item, which is the objective of the mission.
If this scene were in VR, I would say the cinematic effects would be even better since we use hand tracking feature on the VR headset to track our hand which detects raising wrist to switch between realities. Additionally, using the controllers as guns in the game is an intuitive way of interacting with the game while maintaing immersion.
Week 4 Workshop
National Geographic VR and Paper Birds are two amazing VR games that are drastically different from each other while maintaining a high level of immersion for the player. For Paper Birds, the sense of enchantment is maintained through the movement of perspectives. In the entry scene, where the protagonist was meandering in different scenes, I was able to see the scene up close as I move my head forward or tilt it. But more importantly, it is the lack of distraction -- by setting everywhere else black -- and the fittingly-cued music and voiceover that focused my attention on what's happening there, prompting me to locate the scene anxiously when it dimmed out. The story is highly linear as the player does not have much room to explore and interact with the elements in the world. Nevertheless, by employing the first-person narratives of each character -- the boy, little sister, grandpa, and grandma -- players could easily substitute themselves into the perspectives of these characters. The whole story revolves around the idea of Paper Birds and at the few moments where players could interact with the game, our hands are the manifestation of paper birds and the elements that constitute them. In the end, the experience culminates when the player gestures to create the unique music with the grandpa, and completes the morale of the story that inspiration is not forced. The cherry on top is the unique artistic style of the story: the scene and characters feel like clay figurines and the movements feel like stop-motion animation. Such a unique yet imaginative cinematic style is very much compatible with the idea of Paper Birds.
On the other hand, National Geographic VR tries to recreate the beautiful scenery, that is often too remote to visit, in the world of virtual reality with an incredible level of interactivity. I chose Antarctica as my destination and I was astounded by the level of immersion it was able to achieve, all the while allowing for multiple levels of interaction. I could take out my camera to take pictures, climb the iceberg using ice axes, and row the kayak using the paddles. It's not just simply a sightseeing tour, but rather an immersive Antarctic expedition where I need to set up the tent, get supplies, and even get evacuated by a helicopter. Unlike Paper Birds, the National Geographic VR is branched, where different players would have different playing experiences because of their choices. This distinction mainly resulted from their gist: while the former aims to tell a story, the latter tries to recreate an experience; the former is more objective, while the latter is subjective.
Week 3 Workshop
For this project, I selected my room as the place, where I took a 360 photo using PhotoSphere in Google Street View. The photo is mostly accurate with some blurry/inaccurate regions around the intersections of the images. From the storyboard above, I envision the scene taking place in someone's dorm room, since each room reveals so many information about a person -- each object within it has several stories associated with them. By moving the camera angle and zoomming in/out of the scene, the viewer is allowed to explore the overall presentation of the room while get to know every corner/objects of the room.
I used my phone to scan my camera as the OBJ file and imported it into the scene. The reason for this choice is that the camera itself is like an analogy for the eyes -- we could move it and zoom in/out inside the room to see the different objects. In the scene, I used the 360 photo as the skybox, and set up 3 cameras in different perspectives. The first one is the main camera, which mounted a first person look script that allows it to rotate as the mouse moves. The second one is the Camera Perspective camera, which I placed right inside the "camera model". This camera simulates the picture you would see in the viewfinder of the camera. Lastly, I used a CameraModel360Perspective to animate a camera to have a moving view of the camera model. Finally, I created a timeline where we would start with the Camera Perspective, then to CameraModel360Perspetive, and allows to player to rotate the camera from the main camera.
One challenge to implement the idea in the storyboard would be actually moving the camera. Right now, even though we could rotate the camera, the picture are taken from the same point. To be able to zoom in/out, we need to take pictures of the room from any given standpoint, which is hard to do. I am intrigued to know about fixing the model before importing to Unity since the camera model is quite rough and could use some fine-tuning.
Week 2 Workshop
Better Call Saul
Desert scens shot in Albuquerque, New Mexico
The Expanse
UN Secretariant's Office
I tried to recreate the scenes from Better Call Saul, which is famous for its desert scenes, shot in Albuquerque, New Mexico in the United States. However, there were not many different desert vegetation available in Unity Asset Store. Additionally, it was hard to create realistic desert terrain. I used some premade terrain textures and plant packs to make a crude and rough desert landscape. The scene depicted in the TV series underscores its desolation and desperation for survival. I could not depict that using the materials I had and the skills I currently have. The terrain needs to be more realistic, potentially like a height map taken from real life, but I have not figured out how to use height maps yet to create a realistic landscape.
I decided to switch to a new TV series called the Expanse, which is about the conflicts between space colonies as humans colonize new plants. There are many free assets around the sci-fi topic and I used a demo scene with low light, and some other furniture to mimic the office vibes in a space station. Though the office space is still pretty empty, I think it turned out better than the first one, which I did not have too many to work with.
While there does not exist a pathway for exploration for the first scene, the second scene is a spacy and futuristic space complex that certainly has a way to explore.
Week 1 Workshop
I first created a cube and a capsule, and applied a red, metallic material to both of them. Next, I created two more 3D game objects of a sphere and a cylinder. Then, I created a prefab using the sphere, cube, and cylinder and copied the same prefab into the scene. Throughout, I used scaling and rotating to adjust their position/size.
I did not find anything particularly challenging, even though there was some error when I tried to download assets in Unity. It produced an error of "[PackageManager] Error System.InvalidOperationException: Failed to call Unity ID to get auth code." I was able to resolve the error after signing out of my Unity ID.
On the other hand, the ability to create prefabs, models, materials, and scenes and being able to share them across the Internet so that anyone could download pre-made building blocks and build a new project with great efficiency.
I want to know more about the particle system that was mentioned briefly in class. The ability to simulate particles like rain and snow is at the core of any physics system and I am intrigued to find out how it works and modify it according to my needs.
Hi Philip, Thanks for your work and describing what did you for. We will learn about particle system briefly in this class.
Describe what role you played on your team. Who did you have to work with to achieve your goal? What was the outcome of the project?