FRUIT LAND: UNITY SPACE
For this Unity project I wanted to explore a space made of fruits, like a rendition of a candyland, but more healthy. I started off my picking my 3d space online, and it is when this fantasy land one caught my eye for it looked like a magical jungle.
I then went on to find my main characters which I chose to be fruits: apple, orange, strawberry, pineapple.
After studying some online Goldberg Device youtube videos, I picked some interactions I found to be doable and related to my theme. I chose to show the apple falling off a tree onto a plane as my first interaction. It then goes on to interact with the orange, and they both bump into these dominos structures, I have made a material that I wanted to conceptually look as if the orange and apple have mixed by them bumping into the domino, and you can see that with the color scheme of the dominos.
It was pretty hard to get back into understanding how the physics of the objects would work, but after going through the trials posted on moodle, I got the hang of it pretty quick and obviously with the help of immense youtube tutorials.
I wanted to build my concept around what fruits goes through before ending in a smoothie, so I wanted to create a concept of an almost behind the scenes kind of thing, So we see the fruits interact with each other, and plates, ending up in a blender producing the smoothie. For the interactions I wanted the fruit to look as if it's travelling and we do end up seeing a scene change as it faces its doom.
Some cool c# scripts I had to use to get the final result were:
- random color switching
- fruit jumping on collision
- fruit sticking on collision
- impact trigger
SOUNDS
I chose a very bubbly background sound, something resembling Charlie and the chocolate factory music. And for my impact trigger sounds, for the first scene I wanted the impact triggers to be very protruding so I chose a squish almost sound effect as the fruits are bumping into things, signifying the impact and realism in a way, as for the second scene, I did my own where I bumped random objects into a plate, until I got the most desirable effect. Since you can see the strawberry get bumped onto plates, and finally as it bumps into the blender signifying its end, we heard the blender go and we see the final smoothie. The reason I chose a strawberry for this scene is because I personally love eating them, and have been indulging in them for its their current season,
Challenges
some of the major challenges I faced was controlling the direction in which the fruit moved, for the scripting was too complicated for a beginner like myself, so I had to let the fruit guide me into where I am going to build my interactions. Secondly having the fruit stay still without imposing the rigidbody constraints on them was also kind of hard, for I wanted to have them stay inside of bowls but they kept making the bowls move in return and it was a mess in general. Thirdly, some of the colliders didn't fit perfectly on some of the objects I used which caused a lot of awkward interactions before adjusting them enough so I can get the result I wanted. And finally, I just felt that something like unity needed a whole semester to work on, and came at a very awkward time during the semester so it wasn't as enjoyable as I found it to be my former times.
In general, unity can be super awkward at times, since there are so many different directions you can go to get one result, I tend to go on the work smarter not harder side, but I would love to actuallly get down into it, since it is a challenge at the end of the day, and overcoming it is one of the best feelings ever.
The Environment
I would say I created a unified environment by making sure the sound, skybox, and the 3d space, and especially the characters I had (fruit) all had the same theme going , which is this jolly, merry, happy all around feel. I also made sure the device was going somewhere and had an ending and wasn't random, also made sure to explore the space. And if you focused enough you'd see pineapple staking places of trees. The color scheme as well was very bright and gave a happy feel, which was exactly what I was trying to portray.
Final