This was our last full week to work on our projects. Next week we are off to Hamilton College to work on the virtual reconstruction of a Spanish Theater. I am very exited to test what I’ve learned to see what I can do to help others. To be honest this week was pretty stressful for me because I really wanted to finish my project this week so I can relax going to Hamilton and only focus on the presentation on Week 8. I worked around 10 hours a day this week. I am happy to report that my project is almost done. I am 99% finished with my Modern Penn Hall scene and my 1832 Penn Hall scene is almost done as well. All that is left is to do some touch up work and possibly add some historical information the user could read. I am confident I can finish this during my free time at Hamilton or right when we return. I hope to learn a lot from Hamilton. Because the conference is mainly focused on what I have been working on this whole summer, I am looking forward to talking to experts on the topic to learn more about Unity development. After this internship I hope to be able to take what I’ve learned and try to develop something fun and useful in VR.
Getting into more specifics as to what I’ve accomplished this week, I started off the week completing the final edits of penn hall and getting it ready to export to Unity. I made this process very tedious and inefficient. If I did it again it would only take half of the time. Every time I wanted to make an edit, it would change the texture map, so I would have to go back and re-wrap the texture to the model. Right once
I got everything wrapped up, I found another flaw with the model, that could only be seen up close in the Vive. This meant I had to go back into blender and do everything all over again. It was probably the most agonizing part of my project. Next time I won’t even bother wrapping the model until I approve of everything with a Vive walk through.
One of my debates was how to create a border for my project. Because I was only modeling a 50 meter radius around Penn Hall, the terrain just went into nothingness and it made the scene look very empty. I decided to look into creating a water border. It looks very beautiful and it doesn’t distract from the main scene. To add a feel of land going into the distance, I added a ring of trees on the other side of the water.
I am happy with how the scene turned out. I plan on showing this scene to my peers to see if there is anything I missed. I am open to criticism and improvement. It is far from perfect compared to a professional development company, but for a Undergrad Project I think it is a good way of combining all the skills I learned in the past 6 weeks.
