Unity Playground Revision (Playground Part 2)

This assignment is in two parts.

1. Create an instantly recognizable environment in Unity from a prompt chosen by a different student.
   • The Readme will include notes on what you did
   • Further, The space should be viewable from a single point of view (looking/rotating around in all directions). Position the camera appropriately, and assume we can rotate the camera freely, but not move its position.
2. Become an expert in one thing (see below)

Playground Revision

You are going to improve, revise, or redesign a space originally chosen by a different student.

Your new project will be assigned randomly.

You will be starting again from scratch, although you can connect with the student you have been assigned for any of the assets that they used. You also need to credit them in your project, of course.

Become an Expert on one “thing”

How do you become an expert on one little part of unity? Research! Look that thing up. Read the unity manual page on it. Read any other official documentation about it. Find a youtube video, maybe. But what to pick? There’s a list below of some options, but feel free to surprise me. If you have used Unity before, the thing you pick should be new to you. This is about you going through the process of researching something you don’t know about. I care less about this specific something being useful to use long term, although it is nice to have at least one little thing you know you have under control. Some things are easier than others, which isn’t “fair”. That’s …fine. I expect you to challenge yourself to your ability. This assignment shouldn’t need to take longer than an hour or two regardless any prior experience you may or may not have.

Go out and research one thing. Become an expert about one tiny little part of Unity game development. Read it’s documentation page. Make an example thing. Become someone who could show others how to do it. If applicable, implement this thing into your scene. Otherwise, try to demonstrate what you learned in another scene or a written document. Some things you could research are listed below.

-   Goals: Execute a self directed research workflow in Unity.
-   Stretch Goals: What you taught yourself is useful
-   For those with coding experience: 'scripting' is not applicable
    as a *thing*, but some specific scripting tool or utility could
    be.

Submission

Like before, submit a screenshot of the project, but you also must include the readme.txt file that also answers the following questions:

1. What and whose space did you start with?
2. What did you do differently?
3. How did you utilize an understanding of perception to better “sell” your space as a 3D environment?

See the syllabus for more information on the other readme requirements.

Purpose

• Applying knowledge of perception lecture to a project.
• Critically thinking about how spaces are perceived while designing them.
• Designing a space for a chosen perspective.
• Practice in Unity.
• Practice sharing and moving assets around.
• Practice creating environments in 3D.
• Engagement in an analytical and iterative creative workflow.

A few possible Things to research:

• Skyboxes (what's a cubemap? What's equirectangular?)
• The Post Processing Stack Package (This one is fun. How much BLOOM is too much?)
• Colliders vs. Triggers (maybe: whats OnTriggerEnter)
• Playing a sound (make a crazy piano)
• Physics materials. Make a bounce platform!
• An object that rotates as an obstacle, like a windmill on a minigolf course
• Add various lights of various types and edit and adjust them to make a good-looking level and not necessarily like a disco-wonderland.
• Emission Materials
• Order of Execution of Event Functions
• Static Objects
• Tag’s
• Layers. What are they good for?
• Layer Masks (and physics collision layers)
• Navigation, NavMeshes, And NavMeshAgents
• Unity’s Terrain tools
• The absurd “Tree” object (Can you make a good looking tree?)
• Trail Renderer component. It's wonderful. (and easy and fun)
• Particle Effects. (Be warned, it's easy to get something but hard to get something good. Lots of tweaking and fiddling. Worth every second)
• Importing and using textures in materials (make a texture in photoshop (filter>render>clouds, filter>noise>add noise, gradient map, etc); don't use asset store for this.
• Unity UI and the ever-obtuse RectTransform.
• Cinemachine (can you automate a camera to fly through the scene and blend between states? No scripting needed, it can all be done with the cinemachine package)
• ProBuilder/ProGrids packages (there’s a good 30min talk on unity’s youtube page)
• 2D Sprite Editor – Can you rig a 2D image with bones?
• The new Timeline features in unity 2019
• Tilemaps
• SpriteShapes
• TextMeshPro
• Unity’s built in Cloth Simulation component
• And so much more! There’s all sorts of stuff in Unity, you can choose just about anything. Try looking through The Unity Blog, archives where they often write posts about new or experimental features.