ROOM 108 - PREVIZ IN UNITY 5
I had a gig a while back, took over 200 hours, finally hit a technical brick wall, so to speak, realized it would not be possible for me to get the level working the way the client wanted, and the whole thing sort of unraveled from there.
I am now stuck preparing to refund the amount I was paid so... all that work, nothing finished to show for it.
-ambient audio loops running in the background of areas.
-realistic lighting
-3d art assets and 3d environment content in a variety of styles from realistic to painterly or cartoonish.
-footstep sounds and first person controls with collision detection.
-Mac, Windows, & Linux executables
-postprocessing effects [bloom, antialiasing, SSAO, motion blur, etc]
-animated surfaces [i.e. an animation playing on surface of an object, or the object itself moving in a looping animation] and shader effects [objects affected by wind, water and glass reflective effects, particle effects, etc]
You should NOT ask for any other sort of interactivity, beyond just the previs/virtual tour format. I may or may not succeed in adequately implementing it and if it's essential to your project, please hire someone else.
You should NOT request a mobile/HTML5/WebGL solution as this has serious limitations in terms of memory and the debugging process is potentially vastly more difficult.
I made this in just under a week for Missio Dei Pastor (formerly my
Youth Pastor, way back when), good friend who I play board games with,
and father of many small children, Mark Ball. I did the whole
thing for $64, and basically the gig involved architectural previs for
a planned remodeling/renovation of Room 108 in the old Church of the
Redeemer building in Eastwood (Houston, Texas).
So essentially I
started by trying to recreate the room as it was, then I started
changing things as requested, to hone in on what the room was meant to
look like once the changes were done. This project was so
successful that it prompted me to launch a string of related eBay 'gallery'
products. There are ones where I make an entire virtual world for
the customer for as little as $20 for a small room-sized world, and others where I
simply take a prebuilt museum level and load the customer's family
photos onto the walls of the museum, which is priced as low as $4 or so.
You
might ask, if this went so fast, why is 'Panoramic Worlds' taking
years? Why, even, is 'Spiral Skies' delayed by over a month?
The
answer is that there's a huge difference between making a level you can
walk around in, and making a full-fledged game. Games have a lot
of interactivity that 'walking simulators' and the like don't, and that
means programming. Programming is not
my strong suit; I'm way better
at art. Plus, something like Panoramic Worlds is just so much
bigger in scope, and I spent the first few months on Panoramic Worlds
mostly just getting comfortable with the Unity interface and figuring
out how to do a long list of useful things that starting out I had
no clue how to approach, much less do efficiently. By this point
though, the interface and features in Unity 5 are familiar, and I can
make progress way faster than before. That's a good thing for
everyone - from Mark Ball to my potential future eBay bidders - who
wants me to make them a 3d level, just don't ask me to implement any complex interactivity, or request the level in WebGL format, because that can fail miserably!
