Week7/Individual Process - Texture & Shader

For this week, I basically doing lot of research about how to make cartoonish style of environment and realistic natural terrain. And start to do our own environment in unity with textures.
Heres are some reference image I found during the research. Personally like this kind of cartoonish architecture and environment style. I would like to try to set up the environment like this image in the following steps in needed. 

Cartoonish style shader of the building.

Reference image found online. 

Before to have further process of terrain making in World-Machine, I try to play around with terrain settings in Unity as tutorial. Here is the link of the tutorial I found online.
(tutorial of the terrain making)

Grass texture and normal map are found online.

Texture: https://www.filterforge.com/filters/4739-normal.html
Normal map of texture: https://www.filterforge.com/filters/4739.html

To make own texture in Unity, I firstly have to imported new Assets, then assign the texture to the terrain. Here is the screenshot of how the texture is worked with the terrain in Unity after imported.

In order to make the texture more reality, I did some shader settings. I made a new shader instead of the default one to make sure every setting going well with my own texture.

Here is the final outcome of the terrain texture. It's much more realistic with texture that have normal map and much better with specific shader setting.

In the next step, I'm going to have some more details setting of the terrain with plants and also the skybox.

Week6/Presentation Feedback - Communication

/The Creation of Gothic Architecture (my group)

Anthony, Bassel, Benjamin, Lauren, Lorrain, Theodore.

/The Bus Stop of the Future

Martha, Anthony, Kerre, Darren, Daniel.

/The Last Suprematist Sculpture

Marina, Andrew.

Though we do well for the video, but for the presentation content we have to be more careful with the referencing. Endnote have to be located within the content.

After other two groups present, I have learned some different parts about the Communication than our presentation didn't cover. Such as what can we get from good/bad communicate and what is the best way to communicate within different situations.

Week6/Group Presentation - Individual Work

Final presentation slides edit finished by me within Prezi.



For the presentation, I'm going to talk about 'communication within collaborate':

"It is crucial to identify the key factors of communication within collaboration for effectiveness.

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Synchronous Communication

Initially (in our team), synchronous communication (verbal and non-verbal) takes place, where team objectives, roles and other information is shared directly – face to face in real-time. Communication within collaboration can be extended via messaging whether it’s throughout social networking such as Facebook or contacting the members directly to their personal phone number these are all tools of communication.

/Advantages

• Verbal, synchronous communication allow the group to understand what is happening at that very instant. (How to use Unity, What Creation of Gothic Architecture is about)
• It allows an immediate answer to a certain concern or issue a group member raises. (Something within Unity or Sketchup isn't working, Where the database is located, Images or historical facts of Cerseuil)

/Disadvantages

• Team mate can feel pressured into giving an answer on the spot. (This coincides with language barriers, where some of the members are uncomfortable with the common language, which is English in our case)
• Answer not necessary prepared well and not given at best potential. (At times, words may fail us and a more visually engaging form of communication is used to illustrate an idea across)
• Might not have the correct resource with.

​

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Asynchronous Communication

On the other hand, an asynchronous form takes place; this refers to a later reply. For example, sending an e-mail message; where one sends an e-mail and possibly gets a reply 1-12hours later. Which has time lag in between, whether it was an hour or twelve? Another example is where the reader has time to complete them.

/Advantages

• Asynchronous communication is flexible. 
• There is less pressure and can be completed at a more convenient time.
• Allows the recipient to digest the information given, so the final response is improved in relation to context and perspective.  

/Disadvantages

• It can lack a sense of immediacy so no immediate action given.
• Crucial information being out of date once viewed.

In our case, we have touched on multiple forms of communication to complete our given tasks by the tutor as well as between the group and group designated tasks. It has made it more efficient and easier to comprehend. "

(content collected by group member)

Week6/Individual Process - Terrain

As the requirement of our clients, we need to build a 3D environment for church in Unity. In order to get better terrain(more detailed, more natural), I'm trying to use some different program to achieve better out comes.
 
I'm currently use a program named World-Machine, it's a powerful and flexible tool combines procedural terrain creation, simulations of nature, and interactive editing to produce realistic looking terrain quickly and easily. Here is the capture of what I currently have.
 

 
The way to use World-Machine is kind of like what I used to do with Flowchart in Cry Engine, so it's not very hard and won't spend too much time on .

 

 The final terrain could save as .RAW file then easily import to Unity.

Week5/Process - Group Presentation

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After 3 hours group meeting today, we have done some part of the presentation slides. It's not finished yet,we'll keeping adding new content to improve it. I advised to use Prezi as present tool, here is the screenshot of the draft slides:

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And we also finish record some videos about our project topic, though It's still need some more editing.

Week5/Presentation Feedback - Planning

/Aerial Ropeway in a World Heritage Environment

Bethany Louise, Maria, Daisy, Iqra, Yen, Matthew.

/The Bus Stop of the Future
Jason, George, Violet, Michael, Tonny.

Critics:

1 Keep reading the notes or screen, have no eye contact or body language to communicate with audience;

2 Voice not loud enough to get everyone's attention through all presentation;

Good things learned:

1 Clear layout of powerpoint slides to show the keypoint, well thought of hierarchic with the slides format;

2 Interesting ideas of video editing such as appropriate background music of the video, jump out of subtitle;

3 Detailed analysis of a variety of situations and the importance of each part during the whole project;

After the presentations, I have learned that Planning is every important for a group project. To analyze the expected and unexpected situations of the project, we could have a well control of everything during the process.

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Our group will be present next Wednesday, and we have already done some research and built up several ideas about the interface of project, the use of database. What we need to focus for now are:

1 Powerpoint slides for the presentation;

2 Video making about the project processes;

Also we are informed by tutor Stephen:

1 have to considering about Aesthetics of our own project style;

2 our client John James wants everything simple and cartoonish;

We will have a group meeting on Friday to get further work out.

Week4/Individual Process - Ideas

- Project: the Creation of Gothic Architecture

As the requirement, we basically have to do a database of gothic architecture structure in game engine Unity. Target buildings are Gothic Style cathedrals in North France which been built during 1080 - 1250. 

(image from John James' presentation slides)

The image is the map of the early 1740 Gothic churches during 1100 - 1250 in Paris Basin. From the lecture presentation done by John James, I have learned 2 things about the map:

1 these buildings are regularly been built in different locations for some reason (material supplier, financial resources, etc);

2 the church built with same gothic style but different details inside (structure courses, religion interests, etc);

-Transition from 2D to 3D

Then I'm think of we might can use this map as reference to create the start page. People could find the church in by zoom-in the area they interested. When the people zoom into a certain ratio, 2D map can step into 3D environment. I can't really tell by words, (sorry about my poor english), but I found a video shows exactly what I'm trying to say. (NUKE 2D to 3D in case the link doesn't work, I have got some captures from the video as well to show what I mean)

This is just what I'm thinking about the navigation between 2D to 3D, it might not that easy to process but hope will have little help.

- Search engine for database

I have also got some idea about what could be do with the elements inside the building. Inspired from ATG(audio tour guide/video about how 'Smart Tour Guide App' work), it's basically an application which serve for tourist to get information when they walk through in the building. The good thing learn from ATG is that the information could have voice reading instead of people have to read it by themselves. Because since I tried the Oculus Rift stuff in the class, I find out that the resolution is not very high, might not a easy thing to read too much. 

Here is a link of a ATG application developing company, might useful to get some ideas(orpheogroup).