The Virtual World Building artifact is a project where we are meant to create a representation of our hometown within Unity and create text to describe our environment. At first I didn’t have any passion towards this project as I’m not especially excited about sharing my hometown. Not that I don’t like where I come from or that I am somehow embarrassed but just that I don’t necessarily think it has anything worth sharing. I just wasn’t sure how to fulfill the requirements while also making it interesting. Then I had an idea. I always enjoy in video games when you can break your way into an off limits area of the game. For instance, I remember doing this one Skyrim glitch where you could parkour your way on top of a building, then use a shout to get on top of a wall. From there you would have to walk a specific route and if you did it correctly, your character would fall through the floor of the map and you would be underneath everything.
Here is an image of how it looks. Then you could walk your way over to a secret chest that had a bunch of different loot inside. I think the way the game was coded, all merchants have a secret chest that isn’t supposed to be accessed by the player. Anyway, I always enjoyed “breaking” games in this sense so I wanted to create a game that would be very “breakable”.
This got me thinking, how do I create a world that somehow represents my hometown while also has fairly messy meshes. We were told we could download free 3D models to use which was definitely relieving. My hometown is State College, which is home to the popular college Penn State. Penn State is a good school with high ranking sports teams. They have the second largest stadium, Beaver Stadium, in the western hemisphere and the fourth largest in the world. Beaver stadium is recognized as the best stadium in college football. Basically I feel like if I had to create State College, I need Beaver Stadium.
Well maybe I can find a 3D model of Beaver Stadium online somewhere but if not I guess I could just import a generic stadium……. Then I had a great idea. What if I could download the 3D models off google earth. If you didn’t know, google earth has this cool feature where they combine all the satellite images to build a rough 3D model of the environment.
This is a 3D view of NYC on google maps.
So I got started researching how to download the information. I found a great tutorial here.
This tutorial was incredibly helpful and walked me through each program I will need and how to use them. This is a workflow to download google map 3D models and import thyem into Unreal Engine. I plan to just download them and import them into Unity instead.