• Finalizing the topic of having a greenhouse housing a carnivorous plant

find what assets are available to us to use;

• skybox; cloudy sunny day
• greenhouse victorian style
• strange looking plants and trees
• Venus fly trap plant; animated
• gardening tools
• water particles
• some animals
• cage
• rocks

settled for the Green House 3D model; and it came with pots and a planting station inside!

Watering Can

• how to have the watering can when tilted pours water
• playing around with the rain water prefab to have an angle to it and looks less like rain and more like water coming from a watering can
• removed the bubbles that come out of the water prefab
• removed the puddle it creates at the bottom
• found out you can change the image of the rain drops to something more suited
• realized we need to place the water particles at the exit point when the can is tilted and not straight
• figuring out how the console will recognize the tilt of the controller to specify an angle the player must hold it for the can to activate the water particles

Inside the Greenhouse design

• should the plants be placed at random
• should the plants be placed at patches of dirt
• should they be organized in pots

Other animations?

• add a Butterly; but make it huge
• enemy plants package has several animations to choose from

if we get the important parts done; what else do we want to include?

• alien hands
• maybe the sound of running water and animals outside the greenhouse
• several seeds to choose from
• have a button to reset the items to their original location
• when grabbing the watering can it still goes through items such as the table and the pot
• sound of the forrest and birds
• low sound of growling coming from the caged plant to have the user look back

As we first planned the project, we came up with the idea of building an experience where the user can learn more about sorting trash. We wanted it to be not only fun but also a very educational experience.

My role in this project was to create the virtual reality space. We first tried using pre-existing skybox of a city. We tried placing three different garbage bins and garbage such as plastic water bottles, cans, glass bottles, tissues, and etc. We found some prefabs that included diff garbages. We placed them around the city. The skybox on its own looked amazing, but as soon as the garbages were placed, something didn’t look right. So we decided to get rid of the city-scape and build our campus from scratch.

We decided to focus on D2 area. We wanted to build the buildings, create the grass patches. We added trees. We also added the seating areas in front of the dining hall where people usually eat. This is the first draft of our environment and the reference image of our campus.

At this stage, we had one main building in the center (dining hall) and mostly grass patches. Some trash were added as seen. However, there was another issue. We wanted to make sure all three sides were enclosed so that the user would not have to face the issue of not knowing where the environment ends.

Later we added two more buildings on the each side of dining hall.

The environment part of the project was completed. Now we only have to focus on the interactive part of the project.

Moving on, I built the space around The Arts Center more. It took a lot of trials and errors to get the right look and see what details will add to it. I realized having the right overall shape of the buildings and the color correct really makes them look realistic. Adding windows is also another fine element that made the buildings come more alive.

Screenshots from work:

I also looked to see what other structures I could add to make the space more recognizable and realized that there were long, rectangular direction platforms around the grass patches. I went ahead and recreated this in the space:

After that I started building the Dining Hall as well as A6 on the other side.

I identified A6 as being the tallest building among the three, and made sure that was clearly visible in the space.

And finally, here we have the final look of the actual environment!

For our group, we decided to make a project on bringing awareness to the environment and waste issue at NYU Abu Dhabi. It seems that many of our students lack the knowledge of recycling properly and frequently, so we want to use this project to address that problem.

The interaction we want to recreate in this VR project is the act of picking up trash on the ground and recycling it into the right bin. We decided to use our own campus as the actual environment in the project. One important decision we made in terms of the campus was to focus on one portion of it – not too much space, but enough to move around, be able to see trash littered around, but at the same time exude a sense of a closed space so players don’t wander around and stay within that designated area. Our set area was the space right outside D2, where there are grass patches and A6 and The Arts Center are on the side.

So far, the groups have been set to take on the following duties:

Building the environment – Lauren (making buildings and environment) & Ju Hee (adding objects, trash and cats to the space)

Making the interaction – Yufei & Simran (picking up of the trash, recycling into the bin)

For the environment, I decided to make the actual campus space (buildings, composition, staging and lighting). Initially, I was going to decide on a color palette and build a space using that based on the campus. We thought maybe we could build an “angular” version of our campus using simple shapes. But after trying that out with simple cubes, I decided the key is for players to be able to identify it as our campus and it had to look more realistic. So I went to take some reference photos of that area as well as looking at Google Map to get an accurate sense of space.

I started working on The Arts Center first because it’s big and easy to recognize. Once I have it finished, I can build the space around it. I also first searched for a lot of textures that I could use for the buildings as well as the ground/environment.

I’m happy with the progress I made for today. More coming!

Group members: Adham, Cassie, Nico, Vivian

March 3

planning/storyboarding – see Nico’s post

March 10

This past weekend I started to build up the environment. I started out by messing around with the terrain builder, as part of our plan included having the bamboo garden surrounded by mountains. This was relatively straightforward and fun to play with, though there were a few differences from when I went from using my laptop (I have 2017.3) to the PC in the classroom.

When I made a perimeter of mountains, however, placing the camera in the center made the mountains seem a little overbearing. To accommodate this, I placed a platform mountain of sorts in the center, with the camera on top of it. This way, it feels like the user is up in the mountains and gives a much more peaceful effect:

I chose to create somewhat jagged-y mountains because they reminded me of some of the mountains in China – rough yet mystical.

I also played around with the painting feature, and painted on flower details of the platform the user stands on. I got the texture from Grass Flowers Pack Free, and didn’t realize until I placed it in the environment that the flowers actually moved around, like they were swaying in the wind. I’m not sure if we will keep this effect or not, but for now I think it adds a nice peaceful effect, and could possibly be accompanied by calming wind sound effects.

To build up the rest of the environment I relied on other prefabs. To create the circle of rocks surrounding the user, I used rocks from LowPoly Rocks. I got the bamboo from Shuriken Set (which Nico found), the watering can and sickle from Garden Realistic Tools, the tree stump from LowPoly Trees and Rocks, and the skybox from Skybox Series Free. At the moment, this is what one view of the environment looks like:

We’ll have to talk more about how we want the bamboo to be represented and how close it should be to the user. Since there is a circle of rocks, it might make sense for there to also be a circle of bamboo rather than just a section of bamboo in front of the user.

March 11

During class we touched base on more stuff to do for the environment:

• Waterfall – found something in the assets store for this, Water Fx Particles
• Make log wider – this way it works with the gravity of the objects on top of it (before the watering can and sickle were falling off of the log for some reason…this was why)
• Make the bamboo closer to the user – less walking, limited space
• Prettier bamboo material
• Not have grass/flowers too high or else when objects fall you can’t see them
• Have a different color flower – right now it looks like hay

I also started looking around for some music and sound effects we could use. I found some nice sounds of birds chirping and leaves rustling in the wind, as well as a sound that could be good for when the bamboo is being cut.

Later in the evening Nico and I also worked on putting the script he had and the environment. This was really nice because it gave me a better idea of how the space looks and can be better designed when wearing the actual headset. We ended up scaling everything in the environment down so this would be easier to work with in the scripts, and so that the user didn’t have to walk as much. This actually ended up having a nice visual effect as well, since it somehow felt more like a canyon. We also talked about more things to work on with the environment:

• With the rock circle – make the circle smaller, with less but bigger rocks, and experiment with them floating
• Take flowers off of the mountains (I had accidentally painted these on, which wasn’t apparent until we scaled everything down)
• Add material variation in the mountains
• Add more bumps in the platform mountain the user stands on for terrain variation

March 12

Today I worked on making some of the improvements to the environment:

• Removed the flowers that were on the background mountains
• Made the rock circle into larger floating rocks, tilting at different angles and floating at different heights. I actually really like this effect, I think it gives an odd sense of power yet is still zen.
• Added in more bumps/raised terrain sections around the platform mountain that the user stands on
• Started experimenting more with the ground…put pinker flowers in the back and short green grass in the circle where the user stands. However, there is a kind of warp in color that happens when the user moves around their head, which doesn’t necessarily cause any issues but it might look slightly out of place. I’ll have to see what the others think.

Here’s what the environment looks like at this point (sans bamboo – will add this in as a group tomorrow):

March 17

These past couple days were spent making finishing touches on the environment. The general consensus on the grass and flowers was that the color change was due to rendering, and was too distracting for the user. I found a blog post online about how to make grass using the tree building tool, but I was having a little trouble getting it to work. I also tried to mess around in the terrain settings, yet this was in vain as well. Eventually, the issue was resolved by adding grass by painting them as trees rather than as a detail – I ended up finding a grass model in a package from the asset store and using this. I also added bushes in the mountains to look kind of like trees to get some variation in the color in the mountains and to look more like those mystical yet peaceful Chinese mountains I was inspired by.

The last thing I worked on was the placement of the bamboo. The space the user is in is a bit limited, so the bamboo was going to have to be placed in a way so that the user did not have to walk much. I ended up placing the bamboo in a semi-circle around the user, so the user can simply turn around to view the other bamboo stalks that are available to interact with. I think this placement also gets the user to turn around and look at the 360 view around them, whereas a clump of bamboo in front of them would simply station their viewpoint in one spot.

Pre-development blog.

Hello friends
Our virtual reality is based on not a very everyday action, but it is done very very often – Watering the plants. We came up with this idea after we have met at the market place and one of the things that have inspired us was a man-eater plant from “Little shop of horror”.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GLjook1I0V44
Here is the video of that plant 🙂

Our idea was to create a terrarium/greenhouse where the player would be placed and he/she will see a desk in front. So here is the storyboard.

There will be various seeds on the table, but if the person will choose a specific one, a man-eater plant will grow. Here are some pictures that really relate close to what we imagined as our environment

There will also be a man-eater plant at the back, but the person does not know about it unless he looks back 🙂
That is all for our idea, hope you like it 🙂

Development blog #2

Greetings!

Here is our development blog #2. We have created a work station and implemented interaction with objects. We have used the prefabs that were used in the “Steam VR” interaction example such as “throwable” script and of course the camera from it. It made it much easier since the camera contains the controllers. We created a working station which was taken from parts of the “Green house 3D” asset. We just took wooden parts and created a workbench and some shelves. After finishing with the work station and adding the “throwable” script to some cubes and spheres, we added a water jug and a pot and actually made the pot to hold objects (mesh collider), and now we can place the objects into the pot. We have also added the same scripts to the water jug. Now we were able to pick up the water jug and throw it (just for fun). After doing that we tried to add water particles to the tip of the jug to make it pour water. We have added the “Water FX” asset, but it had only rain. We have decided to change the area of the rain to a tiny area and make the source be the tip of the water jug. There were some problems with gravity and at that moment we have stopped 🙂

Here are some videos :

Development blog #3

Greetings. This week was the biggest move for us. We have finished the project and we have implemented a lot of new things and updated some scripts:
-Water from watering can fixed and now works only when can is tilted more than 45 degrees
-Added a seed interaction with the pot. When the seed is in the pot and is watered, it grows.
-Added some plants for the inside of the greenhouse
-Added more trees on the outside of the greenhouse
-Added a “small” butterfly 🙂
-Added a cage with a plant at the back
-Implemented sounds
-Added some throwable objects

Here is a short video of the project.

Everyday Theme:

• Find your glasses!

Scenario:

• Living with different people in the share house
• User (A person with blurry vision/bad eyesight)

Setting:

Bathroom

• Shower
• Shelf
• Sink
• Door

Layout:

• Rectangle

Storyline:

The user has just woken up and he is heading to the bathroom. The story begins from the point of him being at the door of the bathroom. Because he is sharing the house, he has three other housemates whom he is living with – all of them with some kind of vision problems (bad vision). There are four glasses lying around in the bathroom. Help him find the right glasses!

Original (blurry)

Four kinds of glasses:

1. Double vision
2. Zoom In
3. Zoom Out
4. Normal (clear vision)

The user will hear a voice when he puts on the wrong glasses like the following:

1. Double vision – “Wow…I’m seeing double”
2. Zoom In – “Hmm…this doesn’t seem quite right”
3. Zoom Out – “These aren’t mine”
4. Normal (clear vision) – “Finally, I see things properly!”

Storyboard:

For our project, we want to create an environment that relates to sustainability on campus. If someone passes by trash without picking it up, we wanted to challenge what happens in the “real world” where there are no consequences. In our alternate reality, we hope to have negative feedback so that the user/recipient is transformed, translating into different actions/reactions in the real world. We hope to use a Gazelle article written about recycling on campus to inform our interaction design.

Some initial questions: how campus focused should it be? Should we create an environment that is a realistic representation of campus? Do we make the campus environment more abstract? When designing virtual reality experiences, how do we provide feedback to the user when they have reached the edges of our world? How should the trash respond when someone walks past? Do they rise and float in the user’s field of view? Is there some sort of angry sound that increases with time? What feedback is provided if the user puts the trash in the wrong compartment (plastic vs paper vs general like the campus receptacles)?

From this initial concept, we decided to just start building the piece in Unity to see what we are capable of accomplishing in a relatively short amount of time. We split up the work: Lauren and I will do the interactions and Ju hee and Yufei will build the environment.

After the first weekend, we had an environment built with a skybox and some objects. As a team, we’ve decided to change directions in terms of the environment…we want to build an abstract version of the campus. This will delay things as we only have a week left and the environment will take at least three days to build, but I think it’ll be worth it in the long run. I’d rather have less complex interactions and a more meaningful environment at the end of the day. Since Lauren has a very strong vision of what she wants the environment to look like, we shall separate the tasks differently. She and Ju hee will do the environment and Yufei and I will try to implement the interactions.

Here is the lovely environment that Lauren and Ju hee have built. It looks very much like campus! Yufei and I have just integrated the Vive and SteamVR system into the environment and are looking around the space. I wish we would have integrated it earlier as there are a few scale issues and the space is very very large, things that can only be seen through the headset. We shall have to implement a teleport system and rescale objects.

Yufei is working on the teleport system. SteamVR 2.0 makes it quite simple to add teleport! We just needed to add the ‘teleporting’ prefab and the teleport points. One thing we are struggling with is the level of the teleport system. It needs to be at player arm level and we’ve tried various combinations of levels of ground, player, and teleport points, but when we make it the same level, the player teleports lower for some reason. For now, we shall place the teleport points slightly above.

Yufei made the system into a teleport area rather than points. The arc distance of the raycast seems to be something we need to play around with to match a comfortable level for the player’s arms. For now we have made it 10 which makes it easy to teleport, but difficult to teleport to a close location.

We have spent a lot of time setting up our base stations unfortunately. Additionally, whenever we look at the environment through the headset and move our heads, the buildings seem to flicker in and out and sometimes disappear completely. A forum search reveals that we need to adjust the clipping plane which apparently means the region of interest that is the visible scene. We have adjusted the near and far parameters to 2 and 2000 respectively and that seems to work just fine! Additionally, the textures on the grass and floor seem very pixelly and stretched out so I’ve increased the tiling on their shaders.

Time to implement interactions on the trash! I’ve added the Throwable and Interactable scripts to all the objects. For now, there are cereal boxes, toilet paper rolls, wine bottles, cans from food, and water bottles. Yufei and I decided to delete the toilet paper rolls as why would one throw those away and delete the wine bottles as they have liquid in them and one cannot recycle glass on campus except in a few places. We also deleted the cans as one can only recycle metal in the dorms and we wanted it to feel like waste disposal when walking around campus. We did add a chip bag as we wanted something to go into the waste bin rather than one of the recycling bins.

Speaking of the bins, I’ve added labels to them. At first I used the UI text, but that made it be seen through all objects and it was quite blurry. To rectify the blurriness, I increased the font size substantially so that it was now bigger than the character size and I reduced the scale of the text object to the size that I wanted the text. Another forum search revealed that because it was the UI text, it could be seen through everything, so I have changed to the textmeshpro Text and the problems seem to be fixed.

I am testing the objects to see if they can be picked up but they are quite far from the player since they are on the ground. Yufei and I are continually playing around with the ground, teleport, and player levels to find something that works, but nothing seems to. We’ve tried putting the ground and player at 0 like it says to do online, but when we also add the teleport in, the teleport level seems to change a lot. I shall make the objects float for now as we are running out of time.

I am struggling with finding the right attachment settings on the scripts. Additionally, our binding UI does not work, so we seem stuck with the default binding of having an object picked up with the inner button on the controller. The object still doesn’t seem to be picking up.

I don’t know what I’ve done differently, but I can pick up one of the objects now. However, it doesn’t seem to stay in my hand so I’ve only nudged it. It acts like a projectile so it takes whatever velocity my hand gives it in the direction of the nudge. Not good!

Yufei has been working on the objects and says that we need the objects to have gravity for us to be able to throw them. She has also found the sound files. The problem is should we just place the trash on tables. I’ll play around with it and see how it looks…after all, it can just be like the D2 tables I guess. It doesn’t look that bad honestly, but Max comes to save the day by helping us find the right combination of ground, teleport, and player. Also, it seems like our room setup was incorrect which is why it was difficult to reach the floor. Either way, the system seems to work a lot better now and I also feel less nauseous now when testing since it feels more natural. I still need to find an arc distance that works. 7 seems best for now. I have also kept the tables as they are reminiscent of D2, but moved the objects so that they are scattered on the floor.

For the bins’ interaction, I planned to add tags to the objects and the bin. If the tags matched, if they were both ‘plastic,’ then it would be correct. I added the test for this condition inside the loop of the target hit effect script on all the objects, not realizing that the loop just checks for the target collider, not the possibility of the non-target collider. I modified the script to add two public wrong colliders for the other two bins. If it hits the target, I want the correct sound to play and the object to be destroyed upon collision with the bin. If it hits the wrong one, the incorrect sound should play and a message should pop up saying: “This object should be placed in the bin marked: “ + the tag of the object. Thus, for the chip bag, water bottle, and cereal box, their target collider is the bin they should be placed in and the wrong colliders are the two remaining bins.

I’ve added two audio sources for the incorrect and correct sounds. However, I keep getting an error in the debug log about there being more than 2 audio listeners. The culprit is strangely the player prefab? It has one attached as expected to the VR camera but it has another one which is strange because it’s a prefab and a Unity scene can only have one audio listener. I delete the one not on the camera and hope for the best. Now my sound works!

Now, the sounds work, but the destroy on collision and the message does not. There is a boolean variable for the destroy already on the script but it doesn’t seem to be working. Perhaps since I modified it? I just make my own destroy method in the script and the problem seems to be resolved. I also need to adjust the level of the bins to be more natural.

I’ve also fixed the cat animation so that it goes from idle A to idle B to walk.

The environment still feels quite big. After you pick up an object, it’s such a chore to walk all the way to the bin on the other side. I’m going to play around with the position of everything in the environment to make it easier to move around. Additionally, I want to make it obvious that one should pick up the trash by featuring the bins quite prominently in the scene, as I don’t want to ruin the feel of the piece with instructions.

It’s now 1 am Sunday night, so I’m off to bed. But hopefully someone in my group or I can work on this Monday morning to implement the nice to haves:

• if you place something in the wrong bin, a message could pop up saying which bin to put it in, so it’s more instructional in nature.
• Having the trash have an emission or make a sound if you are within a certain distance from them
• Having some sort of reaction if you pass this distance without picking it up
• Having more trash and more complex trash

I am working on the message now, but seem to have issues with positioning the UI and not concatenating the tag to the message. If I can’t get it before class, I shall simply delete it.

Mar 3

Our group: Vivian, Adham, Cassie, Nico

We started off with some brainstorming for our interactions and actions:

Initial Ideas:

• Throwing crumpled paper into a basket
  • Implement points based on how far back you are → makes you move around
  • Obstacles (desk, etc.)
  • Crumpling paper
  • Classroom, library
• Putting food onto tray- cafeteria
• Washing face
• Taking care of plants
  • Zen
  • If you cut the plants they just float around
  • Twisting knob motion to speed up time → plants grow, lighting changes
• Drawing
• Slingshot
• Flipping coin into fountain
  • Something could pop out, you have to catch it

After deciding on the plant idea we enjoyed, we decided to go more into details:

Taking care of plants:

• Time
  • Lighting changes
  • Sun/moon
  • Plant growth
• Environment ideas:
  • Dorm room
  • Windowsill
  • Small cottage
  • Outside garden, fence
• Interaction
  • Watering
  • Cutting
  • Picking fruit/flowers
  • Growing bamboo

With a solid idea in mind, we went ahead and designed our storyboard:

–Step 1–

Clump of bamboo in front of you

To your side: tree stump with watering can + cutting tool

Surrounding mountains and other bamboo

You’re inside a circle of rocks

Butterflies are flying around

It’s golden hour

–Step 2–

You have the water picked up

Water is gone from stump

–Step 3–

Bamboo is taller

–Step 4–

Replace water with axe

Now the water is back on the stump and the axe is gone

–Step 5–

Show the particles of the bamboo disappearing

–Step 6–

Now an empty spot of bamboo

Our storyboard:

Mar 6

 After our group roles were self-assigned, of which I got the responsibility of scripting, I thought it would be important to start as soon as possible. Since I knew very little about C#, Unity, and scripting, I got to practice immediately.

The first goal for the day was to play around with some scripts from SteamVR and the online unity manuals. The first script I created was heavily dependent on what I found online. I assembled a script that caused an object to turn into a new prefab once it collided with a sphere. In order to make this functional I had to make sure the sphere and the cube both had rigid bodies and colliders. I also made sure that I could throw the sphere, by using the components from SteamVR, so that I could pick it up by using the back button of the remote. The prefab the sphere turned into was a cup from another asset pack. This was quite a hilarious scene but very beneficial because it taught me how to identify a specific prefab to use as a transformation and to prevent the same effect when touching any other named object.

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The next project was to a script that would imitate the effect of bamboo disappearing when hit with a sickle. I used a capsule in place of the sickle and I made the movement occur by placing a public variable. The movement could be in any direction, it would just add that amount to the current position. The cylinder I attached this script to needed to have a rigid body and a collider in order have effect. I also made sure gravity was activated because whenever I hit it with the capsule I wanted it to fall back down to the floor. The large issue I found with this set up was that the cylinder could fall out of reach really easily and there was no way of reobtaining it.

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Realizing how easy it was to make effect occur on object I brought in several prefabs for similar experiments. I brought in a sickle and stacked bamboo cups (to imitate a bamboo shoot). The script that I created this time was a lot simpler. Whenever the sickle made collision with the bamboo it would simply destroy the object. This is very effective it making it look like the shoot was being shopped at different areas. If many cups were stacked then I believe it would be quite entertaining to see all of the fall down or have some separate effect. This could be played with a bit to obtain the desired result, I will have to discuss with the group a bit. Overall, today I have found a way to make tools able to be picked up and come in contact with bamboo shoots that could either be blown away or deleted.

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Mar 8

Today I started off by recreating a really crude representation of the environment. I did this so that I could start writing scripts that would be realistic of the area that the object will be placed in at the end. This are included a table, the 2 tools to be used (sickle and water can), and a patch of soil with bamboo.

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I worked relentlessly on the script responsible for the function of the watering can. My goal was to make a raycast that would detect the bamboo and then return then return it. I also wanted to make it so that the object knew when it was being poured and when it was not, this depended on the tilting of the object. Past a certain z rotation, as could be seen in the scene, it looked correct to be pouring water. I could not get the raycast to work (couldn’t even see the debug line that was supposed to show up) but I succeeded in making the program know when it was pouring.

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In the end I was very frustrated because the line wasn’t working and I didn’t know how to make the tilting of the can have any function. I placed a child object Particle System on the can when I thought the water should come from and then left the work for another day.

Mar 9

Today I work specifically on three scripts that I thought would be quite vital for the comfort and enjoyment of the final product. These three were: one that got the bamboo to be cut by the sickle, one that brought items back into range if thrown too far, and one that was responsible for the can’s particle system and detection of the bamboo.

I started off with the bamboo script. I ended up keeping it quite simple and basing it off a previous scrip that I talked about a few days ago. I made it so that the object that could cut the bamboo was not definite. A certain name for the cutting object could be listed.

I noticed a large issue with the script when I was trying to hit the bamboo. Only when the sickle was dropped on the bamboo would it make it disappear, this is because there were some problems with the interaction script from SteamVR. The Attachment Flags had to be altered so that the sickle could not clip through items. This also made the entire system a bit more realistic.

Next, I worked on the script to bring the items back from a distance. This took a lot of time but in the end I found out that you had to reset the rotation and the position of the item before bringing it back or else it would fly away. The final product looked very good. It would just drop back on the table once thrown too far. I also made it so that the distance it was being thrown and teleported back from could be altered. I found 2 to be good in the z and x direction. I attached this script to both the can and the sickle.

Finally, I tried working on the watering raycast issue but I ran out of time. I found out why the raycast debug line wasn’t seen though. I noticed that you could only see it in the scene editor. It was pointing the wrong way so I changed its direction (in a quite annoying method) and moved it up so that it aligned well with the nozzle (this required some testing since the scales are so messed up).

So much research, video watching, and web scrolling was required to get even here. It makes the final products feel so good when they work…

Mar 11

I noticed that it was difficult to know exactly when the watering can was pointing directly at the bamboo (causing it to grow) so I decided to add a pointer of sorts. Initially I tried to work with line renderers but this very difficult. It required the position to be continuously updated and the hit position (or end position of the line) could not be infinity. After not resolving the issue I found an extremely solution simply using a cube. I created a long thin cube oriented to way the raycast was and colored it orange just to make it more appealing and fitting with the environment.

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Next, I worked heavily on the growing of the bamboo. I found the growing-flower script from SteamVR and worked off that. I first made two different kinds of bamboo shoots, bambooOG and bamboo, which essentially are the stump the bamboo will grow out of and the bamboo that actually grows out. I did this because I noticed it would make the entire system easier. I could make solely the bamboo vulnerable to the sickle while keeping the bambooOG permanent. I added the growing script from SteamVR to the bambooOG.

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After trying to grow the bamboo I noticed 2 large problems. The first is that the bamboo would spawn way too fast because as long as the can was pointing at the bambooOG the growth would occur (so with every update). In order to resolve this I set a counter that would increase with every frame till 60 and then restart along with running the script. This meant that if the update occurred 60 times a second, then the bamboo would grow 1 per second. Next to tackle was the issue of the bamboo staying on top of each other after growing (and pushing the top ones up). The bamboo did not want to go any higher than 2 shoots tall, they continuously knocked the top one away. This occurred regardless of the position where you spawned the bamboo.

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While doing trial and error with spawning positions and checking/unchecking all the boxes in all the scripts attached to the bamboo, I came across something wonderfully beautifully. You can lock the position and rotation of the spawned bamboo shoots by altering their prefab’s rigid body. What I tried first was freezing the y position but then I realized how that was incorrect (all the bamboo would just fly sideways. Next I increased the mass (for more stability and bounciness) and locked the x and z positions. I came up with a wonderfully appealing result. The bamboo would grow in an amazing way that looked like the individual segments were balancing on each other. Even better was the fact that the bamboos could be interacted with by the can (spinning them and bouncing them up and down). Cutting them down with the sickle was even more relieving too because you could see them quickly destroy (without any effect yet though).

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Naturally, I could have locked the rotations and it would really look like the bamboo was growing straight up but I didn’t think the results was nearly as appealing. With this constant balancing, the used was way more pleased (user tested with Max) and wanted to keep making them grow because it was partially random too. I also realized that the used wanted to keep growing the shoots endlessly so I decided to attach segment to the bamboo script that would release the freezing of the rigidbody when a certain height was reached (public int). The final step would be perhaps to make the bamboo disappear after a while once their height of x position was at or lower than ground level (to prevent cluttering).

Mar 12

Today I made finishing touches to the coding. The first thing I worked on was making sure that the segments at the top of the bamboo sprout would fall off after a desired height and eventually disappear after some time on the ground. I did this by making two functions, one that took off all the restraints at a desired height (before when I did this there were still some problems) and another that waited a period of time to delete it.  The first function was relatively simple but the second one required a counter. I tried using WaitForSeconds() but apparently that can only be use in a enumerator. I suspected update to run roughly 60 times a second so I made a counter based off that.

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The next part I worked on was cleaning up the code of the teleporting-an-item-back script. I noticed that this code was not originally very lenient on placement. The items had to be close to the origin of the environment. I fixed this simply by changing some of the math operations. In the end everything worked wonderfully! The next step is to combine this with the environment!

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Mar 17

Today was the final day. We all grouped together to make sure everything was working and to make sure that the last day of project development could go successfully. When I came in there were still some issues with the colliding of the water and the execution of the growing commanded. After three of us worked on the code for a while we finally got it to work. The large issue had to do with layers. In the end the terrain had to be placed in a different layer along with the can because the water particle system was constantly colliding with it. We go the physics and action to work efficiently. The environment looked good and the objects worked well.