Weekly Workshop

For the first lab assignment, I made a cute little world using two packages: Kawaii Slime and Simple Low Poly Nature. I wanted to depict a fantasy scene, and because the slimes came with expressions, I decided to create a concept where the little slimes are shocked by the campfire.

I used the pre-made scene with trees, clouds, and mountains, but I added all the little elements like the rocks, mushrooms, boat, plants, campfire, slimes, and flowers. I had fun playing with the settings, position, rotation, and camera angle, and I slowly got more used to the keyboard shortcuts and controls. However, I did find it challenging to move smoothly between different positions and views as I positioned my characters and scene elements.

Most significantly, I was extremely upset because the entire Unity program crashed while I was using it, and I lost the entire file. I only have this recording and these pictures to show for my work.

I learned that you can do a lot with a few elements on Unity. I only used premade characters and scenes, but I was still able to tell a little story. I found the potential of Unity exciting, and I want to know more about how to design my own characters and modify their expressions and actions. I was inspired by all the assets I saw in the asset store and all the amazing people who made them and offered them for free for others to play with and use. Unfortunately, I also learned that I should save very often because my entire file was destroyed.

For the second lab assignment, I decided to make two scenes from the movie "How to Train Your Dragon." I really liked this movie and the book it was based on, but since the actual setting is so detailed and nuanced, I took some creative liberties in showing the mountain and village views of the story's location. These are distinct for their high, craggy mountains, the houses scattered along the terrain, and the vibrant water that surrounds the islands and cliffs, as well as of course, the dragons.

For both scenes, I tried to make my own terrain from scratch. I painted the water, mountains, and snow on my own, but I had difficulties because I only had a limited set of brushes, few options from the free terrain texture pack, and not a lot of control over finer details. For example. I wish I could have made more beach-looking blurs between water and mountain, or patches of rock that form cliffs and caves. Still, I think I succeeded in making a fun, craggy lagoon landscape with color variations and interesting shades.

My bigger challenge was that many packages I found on the Asset Store didn't go well with the colors and aesthetics of my DIY terrain. It took a while to find good houses and dragons that look appropriate even though they don't exactly match the vibes of the terrain.

In the end, both scenes look a little like an eleven year old's dragon toys starring in an adventure fantasy fever dream, but I like them a lot. They didn't turn out exactly like I had imagined, but it was interesting, exciting, and pretty true to the source regardless, especially once I played the scene and the dragons started moving and roaring. I also liked how the contours of the mountains and hills make it interesting to explore the terrain from multiple angles.

I learned a lot from this week's lab. I felt the limitations of the free packages more significantly now that I had to accommodate the aesthetic of my terrain, but I also felt proud since I was a lot faster now that I had more practice with the keyboard shortcuts.

There are still a lot of things I want to improve in the future. For example, I want to make cool effects like making the water move, adding moving ships, or making more realistic looking flora and fauna that blends better into the landscape. Regardless, I'm pretty happy with my results!

For the third lab assignment, I decided to make an ant's perspective at NYUAD. What would it be like if you were smaller than a shoe?

First, I used Google Street View to scan the area outside the Arts Center and D2, and I used Scenario to scan two objects: the dancing cactus from the IM Lab and my friend's shoe. I also took pictures of the floor at NYUAD to use as a texture. I then set the area outside D2 as the skybox of the scene.

Next, I set up the scene using the First Person Controller as the base. I scattered the shoes and the cacti around the mini first person controller at enlarged sizes. In order to make them solid, I added a solid mesh collider that would prevent the first person controller from passing through them. Then, I added school supplies and textbooks to give the experience more interesting elements and size contrast. They served as more elements that the user could jump on and navigate around. I also drew and added a little sign to welcome the users into the installation.

Lastly, I positioned cameras around the scene to demonstrate the difference in scale and size. I finished the scene off by making the timeline and demonstrating how to play.

I really enjoyed making this project and am quite happy with the result! I think I was able to create an interesting scene with fun objects that the user can actually feel like they are interacting with. The biggest challenge was thinking of a concept and waiting for objects to process through 360 scanning, but after that initial hurdle, it was fun to set up my scene and imagine what it would be like to be an ant outside D2.

Overall, I learned that a strong concept is very important in making 3D experiences. I also learned about using mesh colliders and importing 360 objects from Scenario into Unity.

Experience 2 Oculus Quest apps:

National Geographic VR

• This was an awesome VR experience. I tried the Antarctic expedition to photograph penguins, and I was amazed by how immersive and realisitc everything was. Even though I knew in the back of my mind that I was sitting on my dorm room floor and waving my hands alone, in my mind I was sure I was seeing penguins, whales, fish, and glaciers. If the Oculus were even just a little more HD, I would be 100% sure I was actually there. I was very much enchanted and thought they did an awesome job.

• National Geographic uses a photography assignment guided by a voice recording to lead the user through fun mechanics like kayaking, climbing an ice shelf, camping out in a field base, and more. It uses short tasks like having to get a sleeping bag or take a picture to structure the overall narrative and keep things interesting. I liked how in the climbing part, an ice shelf on the side collapses to keep things interesting. It maintained enough structure to keep the story going while also giving you time to look around and take pictures as you desired.

Paper Birds

• This was quite different from the National Geographic experience in that it was a fiction story with much less interactivity. The art and the music were gorgeous, but I found myself wishing there was more interactivity because at times I would just be standing for five minutes wishing the characters would walk faster. I think I felt like VR was more additive than expressive in this piece because I would have enjoyed it just as much if it were just a short film.

• The narrative of Paper Birds is interesting though slightly cliche, and it revolves around a young, short-sighted musician boy and his grandfather who has been caging paper birds. The main interactive component of Paper Birds is the times when you get to interact with the blue lights, but even that is quite short. However, the beauty of the art and music do sort of make up for that lack of interaction. In general, I think Paper Birds did a good job, but it could have done more, like allowing the user to play music or giving them more agency to direct the flow of the story.

Plot Actions Project 2 Warm Up: Hansel and Gretel

This could be a fun game for two users, or even just one user who can choose to play as Hansel or Gretel

1. Hansel and Gretel, who are being abandoned in the woods by their father, leave stones and then breadcrumbs to mark the trail back home.

   • This first action gives us a unique insight into the children's character, their cleverness, and their ultimate goal to go home to their father even though he has abandoned them in the time of famine.

   • This would be fun to recreate in VR: first having the user leave stones to find home, then having them get lost when the birds eat the breadcrumbs

2. Hansel and Gretel find and eat from the witch's gingerbread house

• This action leads them into the cannibalistic witch's trap and leads to the most doomed and climactic of the story.

• In VR, this could involve a chase scene

3. Hansel and Gretel trick and kill the witch and escape back home to their father

• This action reinforces their cleverness -- Hansel in offering a thin bone rather than his own arm, and Gretel in pretending not to know how to work an oven so that she can shove the witch inside. This brings the story to its resolution because with the witch's wealth they can go back home and live with their father.

• In VR, this could have parts where the user must choose the right responses to the witch, find a bone to offer the witch, push the witch into the oven, search her house for the treasure, and find the way home (some versions of this story involve a magical swan ride home, which would also be fun)

• I found assets for candy, a forest setting, and mixamo actions that would work for this setting and played with them. Sadly, the only free boy character model I could find did not map easily to the mixamo body type. I will look for a better version if I continue to pursue this idea for my midterm.

After searching online, I found a cute shader that makes little planet type rocks and another that seems to produce some kind of baked pretzely look. I decided on these because I felt like I could use them somewhere in my Midterm Project, which involves a lot of thoughts and symbols about identity, alienation, and home.

Both were relatively simple to copy. The biggest challenge was that whether because I was building in URP or a different model of Unity, some of the node types like Cellular Noise and Simplex 3D did not exist, so I had to substitute them. This is why the shaders aren't exactly perfectly the same, especially for the pretzel.

However, I'm pretty happy with how they turned out, and I exported the package so that I can definitely reuse them for my midterm. I also recorded videos of how they look like.