It feels like the time spent at gettysburg flew by. I am officially at the half way point in my project. So far everything is going on schedule. I believe I completed all of the seperate aspects of the project and now is the time to bring it all together. These next few weeks are very exiting because I am able to apply what I have been learning throughout the summmer and make it into a finished product.
Most of the work done this week was spent with world building and level design in Unity. I started off by aquiring several assets that can enhance the experience of the VR user. The first asset was called Time of Day. It is a special skydome in unity that allows time to pass, and as that time passes, the light moves with the sun. The other assets were rocks, trees, and grass that helped the user feel like they were in a realistic nature environment.
I started off the first day with a forestry design tutorial. It was roughly 2 hours of content. It took me the first couple days to complete. I got to learn a lot about level design and what goes through a game developers head when making levels. There were a lot of tools in Unity I used that I was not aware of. I intend to use these skills and assets when building the environment for my project.
However, upon completing the forest scene, I ran into a problem that I did not expect. The models I was creating in blender did not have the realistic detail to match the environment. It looked like a cartoon building in a photo-realistic forest. The problem with this is when I attempted to add texture maps and detail to penn hall in the past, it never properly transferred to unity. Currently I am hand-making my own white brick texture for penn hall so I know that it will be able to transfer to unity.
Starting next week I plan to remake penn hall to take out all of the problems that I had with the first one. This new model is going to be much cleaner and it will also have the applied brick texture I was working on.
