Pail Creation

My first task was creating a pail to collect objects in. We discovered quickly that due to current constraints on Unity’s kinematic structure and concave objects this would be impossible with one model. I then cut the pail into sections and used hinges as a stop gap.

It mostly worked but we were having issues with items staying in the bucket, we created a new square bucket with fewer hinges than the original round one.

Asset Creation

I created a series of assets for the Beach Recreational scene with Annie doing the rest. Above are the assets I had created.

I had originally captured 360 footage at HTO Park at the beginning of February for the Beach Recreational scene. We had hoped to play with it by playing with the saturation of colours and blurring to integrate it better with the low poly models. We ultimately decided to scrap the real footage for 360 skyboxes and a transparent 360 underwater video with fish swimming projected onto a sphere.

As I mentioned in Blog Post 6 I spent far too long getting procedural clouds to work, Using various tutorials.

I used the Dynamic Sky plug in to create a twilight sky background and animated a flock of birds flying along a path.

There was some difficulty rendering this out properly as it took a very long time in Cycles(around 20 hrs, even on my partners laptop). I tried multiple iterations and various settings to speed up render time to little effect and baking the textures produced a very strange effect that would not work with our aesthetic.

Rather than doing this again for a daytime sky, I edited the colours in After Effects to decent effect. The 360 underwater was composed of low poly models I had created and animated moving along spline paths. It took some doing to successfully create the scene without too much distortions of the models. 

UI Development 

I created a series of icons for the UI and a logo using Affinity Designer

Troubleshooting 

I aided Maddie extensively with troubleshooting throughout the term, particularly with testing the pail and ui elements. This became particularly important as the school closed due to Covid-19. I was able to borrow a VR headset and use my partner’s laptop for testing to continue our work as none of our laptops are VR Ready. We had multiple sessions using AnyDesk and either Discord or Facebook Messenger to try to get the pail working and test the portals. We experienced crashes multiple times due to colliders interacting in strange ways and had to shift layers multiple times. Rather than use my design for the inventory we worked within the pail, allowing the player to cycle through while holding the bucket.