Freerunner

The main aim of this project was for us to gain the basic understanding of Unity, we made an environment with different textures, ground level and trees and then used a 1st person point of view to explore it. The next step is to import out Unit 4 which is the New York rooftops to Unity.

I find Unity really easy to use, much easier than Maya or Mudbox, this software is also quite fun to use because it gives you a lot of freedom and ability to create the environment you like and run around in it.

I have created an environment with many hills to climb and water to swim in, I used different brushes to raise or lower Terrain, once you create something you can give it a texture and you can even chose how the sky would look like and it gives you the right to manage lighting.

To explore my environment I used 1st and 2nd person camera to see which one is easier to use, I quickly realised that when you see the character from 2nd persons point of view it’s a lot easier to control it although being the 1st person gives you a more realistic view of the environment.

I wanted to create a little pond and experiment with water. In order to do that I had to first lower the ground by selecting a tool/brush that would lower the terrain.

Creating this environment was quite fun we had a lot of freedom when it came to this task. I believe it gave us a good look of how to create the lighting and prepared us for bringing unit 4 into Unity.

Heres my final result, when I imported my unit 4 into Unity I had a lot of problems which i had to fix before i could star with Unity, I went

back to Maya and fixed the errors like floating objects or textures

disappearing or even having to scale down objects such as stairs or

even the actual buildings. I also had to fix the background I’m still not happy with how it turned out but I didn’t have much time to fix it.

When I finally fixed all the errors and went on to do some exploring in Unity I found some more problems that I did not know how to fix, there are many glitches, for example when you get too close to a building

you can either fall between the building even though there’s no gap or the objects become invisible and you can see through them. I am

going to attempt to fix this at some point.

Another problem was that for some reason everything was pretty

dark although i have added lighting and sky boxes.

Most of my buildings are connected by ladders and when I went on

unity I found out that I cannot use them without a certain script, a first it was hard to find it and when the script was finally available to use

I ran out of time to get it working on my work.

What I dont like about my work is that it looks really unprofessional

and basic, the textures look fake and the background it really flat.

I really wish I had more time outside of College to do this work

because I believe that If i had more experience and skills in Unity I

could do pretty well.

I have done some research about games that are based in new york city and that include a lot of buildings and the ability to walk on the roof tops.

I decided to use pictures from GTA4 and Spiderman games, when you compare them you can see that GTA is more advanced and has a lot more details, better lighting and a lot better graphics unlike Spiderman which was probably made by who doesn’t have enough experience and skills in making games, Spiderman game has blocks with really simple textures and basic sky boxes, the lighting looks really fake as well.

When I compare both of these games to the one that I have designed about NYC rooftops I can admit that my work looks more like The Spiderman game.

I really like how in GTA the lighting changes automatically depending on the time of the day and I would like to do the same in my game.

Ifaced a few problems in my game that I decided to fix, for example I fixed the lighting and added shadows to make it look a little bit more realistic.

I also came across the problem of my whole work being too big, it made it hard for the character to move around and walk up and down the stairs, so I scaled it down, It's still not perfect but I done the best could at this point.

Timeleap//

RESEARCH-Native Americans

The aim of this Unit was for us to develop our ability with analysing the

research that we have found, also gaining basic information and skills

based on problem solving in art and design.

The whole point of this project was for us to pick a part of history and create an

environment in Untiy that we can later on

explore.

I put a lot of though into this, I wanted to do

things like shelters in London during the

WW2 or The Warsaw Uprising that took

place in Poland but I had to keep in mind the fact that i didn’t have much time on this

project so I went for something much more

easy, I picked the time when Native Americans lived in small villages that they have build themselves before Christopher Columbus

invaded America in 1492.

I research the types of houses that they lived in, they’re called Teepee’s they’re the types of houses they they could always bring with them whenever they were travelling. I looked at the types of designs that is a part of their culture, they have a repeating pattern of

colourful triangles and lines,I also picked up that they used to use colour red a lot.

Then i found pictures of how it looked on the inside for example what kind of beds they had and whatever else they used to keep in their teepee’s. These

pictures helped a lot because before i

found them I had a small knowledge

about Native Americans. The most

important thing that I am planning to model is a Totem pole, A Totem pole is a sculpture craved from large trees,

they represent important events and

stories that have been told through

generations, each character on the

pole represents a different clan or

story. I looked at different textures of

totem poles that I could base my

model about.

These reference pictures are a big

help because I realised that there is a

lot ore to model than I thought, things like fire places their boats or even

little shelters where they would keep their food.

Concept Art / ideas

I roughly drew out what I want my work to look like, I will place Teepee houses aroud a big fire place, I would like to place a big totem by the river so its not

only facing the village but also the sunset. Im planning to create a small fence where

they would keep their horses and cows.

I would like to place two Big rocks with their pattern painted on it by the houses and

a few kayaks.

A bit further away would be to teepee who would belong to the leader of the village.

Although modelling this village was quite a challenge I still enjoyed making this, I

mostly used boxes and vertexes, when i wanted something to look round or

smooth I would press “2” but then I faced a problem which didn’t allow me to bring that to Unity, I asked for help and got

suggested to use the “ smooth” tool whichcan do pretty much the same thing and

will be visible in Unity.

I am really proud of how the textures have turned out, the old material rock and wood texture works really well with the time in the past that I have chosen. The lighting and the shadows give it a more realistic look.

When It came to creating an environment in Unity I thought that it

would be a good idea to create mountains and a forest, There

would be one or two mountains that you are able to climb and look

down at the village, I want to add sky boxes which will look like a

early evening.

When it came to creating this environment I started off with doing my research since I’m not familiar with the period of time that i chose, i read a lot about the culture of Native Americans, their hobbies

and way f living in general,I looked at images on the internet and uploaded the best ones on my

websites. I started creating a model of a Teepee first by placing a cone and removing he faces from

the inside of the shape, i made a small gap to make it able to go inside the model, then i decided to

copy and paste it but change the size of it every time, I then modelled the fire place, the rocks kayaks and so on.

Some time later I realised I was stuck and didn’t know what else to create, this is when I done more

research and found things like wooden sheds, wood for fire, or food supplies that i have mentioned

earlier in the description of my research, I looked carefully at the images that I have found and looked for textures that would look exactly like it or at least similar, for some of the Teepee houses i decided to create one of my own textures on photoshop by placing a pattern onto another picture, I made surethat each house looked different than the other.

When i was done with modelling it was time to move on to Unity and create a playable environment,

I made mountains, trees and a river. I am pleased with the end result, I like how I managed to make it look a little more realistic by adding fog and fire asserts, I also really like how the sky asserts suit my work, it makes it looks like a calm evening in the village of Native Americans.