Process Diary #1

I was given the assignment of creating a virtual reality scene based off of a one word prompt "anxiety." Earlier in the year I had to do a presentation on anxiety in health class. I looked back at the notes, and the research I had done in the process of making the presentation. I rewatched a video that I had found several times. It was a about what life was like on a day to day basis for someone with anxiety. There was one part in the video where the character was on their way to work in their car listening to some music thinking to themselves how nice the weather was, when they started to think about work, they started to freak out and have a panic attack. What I took from this video is that no matter where you are or what you are doing, anxiety is always an issue for someone who has it. I came up with an idea to have a very calm looking scene, but there would be something really out of place, and it would represent the idea that I took from the video. I decided on making the calm area a beach, and the out of place object would be a floating black sphere. I made the beach as basic as possible, just a rectangle with a sand texture with a bunch of trees all over it. I then started the scene multiple times trying to find anything wrong with it. I realized that the island wasn't large enough so that it didn't meet the edges of the skybox and this cerated a very odd black line around the edge of the scene. I tried to make the water surrounding the island, and the island itself as large as possible until it eventually met the edges of the skybox. But at that point I had so many different tiles of the animated water, that even on my computer I was having some small frame rate issues. I then showed it to a friend and they thought it was the weirdest thing that the "island" was square. While I was creating the beach I wasn't thinking of it as an island, I just imagined it as a beachfront. So instead of having the beac be a very very long square, I made it into a almost flat sphere and removed the skybox. This fixed the issue of the black line around the edge, now it was just blue so it looked much better, and the islands edges didn't stick out so weird because they were rounded and the waves actually came up onto it because the edges were slanted, as opposed to the flat perfectly horizontal edges of the square. At this point I had a nice looking, circular island surrounded by water, but the trees on it seemed a little odd. I searched the asset store for more realistic looking trees and went through 3-4 different types of trees until I realized that the reason that they looked so odd was because it was the same trees, just in different spots. So I started messing with the size and rotation of all the trees. By making some trees look taller or wider than others and having them turned a different direction or slanted towards or away from the player it made them look much more realistic, rather than them all looking the exact same. Now I turned to creating the out of place object, I created the sphere and placed it behind where the player was, so that it wouldn't just be directly in front of them. To actually make the scene a little more interesting I tried to create a way for the light source to darken when the player looks at the sphere. At first I had the idea to have bullets constantly being shot out of the players head and traveled to wherever they were looking. While I was trying to create this feature parker noticed what I was doing and suggested that it would be easier to just have an object attached to the players head, that was there at the start of the scene and then it would destroy itself when it touched the sphere meaning the player had looked at the sphere. I then spent the next 2 days trying to get the sphere to recognize its collision with the cube that I had attached to the players head. I kept trying to make it work but to no avail, I even got help from a teacher an there was no sense to be made from the issue. I then tried to use a ray casting system (which I should have done in the first place) but I couldn't make that work either and gave it up. Instead of having the light source  darken when the player looks at the sphere, I just had the light source start to darken itself when the scene started and then eventually the light source would go completely black and everything in the scene would look kinda spooky. I also added in a bit of fire on the cube to make it more noticeable, and I had the fire extinguish itself once the light source went out. In the end the scene would start and the player would be looking out at the ocean, there were wave noises playing that coincided with the animation of the waves, the player would turn, see the ground, trees, and the black sphere. At that point probably 10 seconds into the scene the light would already be noticeably darker, and the player would be focused on the sphere. 20 seconds later the light and the fire both go out, and then the sphere just stands out agains the ground and the trees. What I learned from this project is to do things the correct way. I wasted a lot of time trying to make the sphere and the cube collide where if I had just started with the ray casting I could have definitely gotten it done by the due date.