Sceneography

SCENEOGRAPHY: REFINED BRIEF  

Name : Wisdom Makubile

Project Brief : UFO / FAIRY-TALE / KIRK-STALL ABBEY - ( delete as applicable )

Project Title : Lilith: The Guardian of the Tree

Broad Audience : Child / Teen / Family / Mature - ( delete as applicable )

Mood / Atmosphere : Eerie, Semi Dark

Scene Description

Time of Day : Dawn INTERIOR / EXTERIOR / BOTH

Explanation / Back-story of Scene : 

Lilith is the guardian of the tree, she lives in a magical tree house above the floating mountains in an alternate dimension from earth, hence why the physics being altered. There is a forbidden fruit on the tree above the tree house she lives in. The lost and damned souls are trying to acquire it in order for them to become tangible beings. The planet she lives in is called Genesis, it's set during ancient times. You are playing in this environment as Lilith, trying to protect the tree from the lost souls. The lost souls appear at sunset.

Unity Codes

Trigger code


function OnTriggerEnter()
{
audio.Play();
}

function OnTriggerExit()
{
audio.Stop();
}



Interactive code



function OnMouseDown()
{
audio.Play();
}

function OnMouseUp()
{
audio.Stop();
}



Collision code


function OnCollisionEnter()
{
audio.Play();
}

Introduction to Unity 3D

After a long love and hate relationship between me and Maya I was introduced to Unity 3D. Unity was such a fresh breeze to look at as compared to it's daunting and intimidating companion, Maya. I grasped it straight away and i was enjoying it.


On our first lesson, we were taught the basics of unity, we created a 100m x100m terrain and built a shipyard. I learnt such skills as setting the terrain resolution, being wary about one sided polygons, using the ellipsoid particle system etc.
Creating a prefabs was a something fundamental to learn if you wanted to duplicate anything to use on other level.
Tangent velocity is to change the way particles point.
Local velocity is to pair the particles to the parent object.
Angular velocity is to rotate the individual particles. 
I also learnt how to set up a sky box material.


Below are some screen grabs from the lesson:


Here's where we were learning how to use directional lighting inside the 3D space, the concept is very similar to the one on the Maya package. I thoroughly enjoyed working with lighting as it is important when creating a game to set the game mood just by adding different types of lighting.

Here's where we were learning to place the first person controller (the player) on the scene so the we can move around and test play our environment.

Here we were learning to create invisible colliders so that the player won't fall off from the environment, all we had to do was create a cube > scale, rotate and move to desired place > check off mesh render.

Here's is were we were learning to create the actual terrain

We learnt how to use different brushes to get different results from our terrain.

Below is learning to create and animate particles.

Below: The white line under the colour animation is the opacity.

and finally we were taught how to publish the game as a stand alone web version, you can also publish it as other platforms but a licence is needed for that.

The Computer Game Design Course

This book taught me the importance of research and development and expanding your initial ideas. We now live in an age where the internet is easily available to almost anyone and most designers begin they're initial research online. Going to find inspiration online isn't always the best thing to do because that would mean what ever it is you're trying to do or find inspiration on has already been done. So it is also important to go out and get first hand material. Having a digital camera and a sketch book on you is essential because that would mean you can always capture images for reference at any given time. At this stage a digital camera would be essential for my environment for capturing such references as textures. For example wooden planks for the tree house, leaves and tree bark and other references such as objects and environments are all around me, so it would be good to gather original research. The book stated that the designers of Half Life 2 actually traveled to Eastern Europe to photograph environments and it is also known that Steven Spielberg gathered inspiration for the movie Close Encounters while sitting in his car looking at the pattern of the LA street lights at night. So it is important to go out and gather research instead of doing everything on the internet.   


Below is the chapter Research and Development: pages 84 -91 that I read.

Tree-house Research

As part of my environment, I wanted to add a central location to it, after some research and thoughts, i decided a tree house would do the trick. A tree house would be fairly easy to model on Maya as well as a tree as we've been given a tutorial on how to model and texture a low poly tree. I gathered some images of different types of tree house that would look good with my environment, I've shared a few below:

Most of these ideas would be manageable to model and keeping the poly count low, but i don't intend on creating an overly large house, I will keep it manageable.