Project Description
I was inspired by the Chinese Sci-fi movie called The Wandering Earth. The whole story was based in 2075, where the Sun is gradually dying out. The people of Earth are trying to build giant thrusters to move the planet out of orbit and sail to a new star system.
For my first project, I decided to create an apocalyptic scene, which raises people’s awareness of the environmental impact of our actions: if we keep polluting our nature, we will end up entering apocalypse without any uncontrollable factors (say, the sun dying out). However, rather than a recreation of what’s currently happening on the planet, a preview of the future which human beings might witness within the next century should serve as a more effective warning to trigger concerns about our environment. I decided to set the scene at an abandoned park, a place that’s full of sweet memories. The contrast will be thought-provoking.
Process and Implementation
After deciding the theme of the project, I started to search for sets of skybox materials online that resembles the scene in The Wandering Earth – abandoned city covered in snow. At first, I used “abandoned city” as the key word, because I thought I could always change the color tone and brightness of the image. So I found the following material and modified it a bit.
Then I looked for pre-fabs online that could make up an abandoned park, and I found the package: “Apocalyptic City 2”, which has assets for a video game of zombies, and after adding the assets to my scene with the background of an abandoned city, it looked just like a city invaded by zombies, which differed from my original idea. All the assets somewhat blended in with the background, so that you couldn’t really tell which are the objects I added. Plus, I failed to change the color tone of the image to a level that resembles the snowed city, so I decided to change the skybox material to snow, and the conflict between the color of the assets and the color of the background worked out quite well.
As entering the play mode, I found that my skybox looked like a box: there are edges between each side. It was because I didn’t change the “Wrap Mode” of the image from “Repeat” to “Clamp”.
Also when I planned out the layout of the assets, I didn’t take into consideration the angle of the camera: in fact, I thought I should be able to see everything because its in 3D. However, because of the height of the camera and the scale of the assets, some assets might be blocked by something behind it so that I couldn’t really see it. After testing in the play mode for several times, I moved objects around so that everything can be view clearly.
At last, I added a background music to my scene, which sounded to me had a mixed feeling of sadness & creepiness, and happiness from the past.
Reflection/Evaluation
This is the first 3D project I have ever made using Unity, and I realized how hard it is to work with 3D objects since you have to consider all three dimensions of the object to ensure its visibility. The layout of the scene was also harder than laying out things on flat space (say, webpage). It will be helpful if I could planned out the scene in real life: using blocks and boxes to represent the objects, and see how it looks in the space. Also, I used a lot of prefabs for my project, and realized how powerful they are: they made the whole process much easier. I am more than willing to learn how to build pre-fab from scratch.
Another take-away from this project is the importance of background music. At first, the scene didn’t seem to be arousing for me. I thought it was because I was so familiar with the scene. However, after adding the background music, I actually felt like I’m part of the environment, and I guess the purpose of raising people’s awareness of our environment should be achieved by really engaging people into the scene emotionally.