The final part of this project was to get the newly created environment FBX files into Unity. This is where I ran into a couple issues.
Most importantly, google maps generates its 3D models in a grid format. This means, each grid tile has its own individual texture. This isn’t a problem on its own as most programs understand which grid tile is associated with each texture. However, by default, Unity doesn’t. I spent a lot of time researching how to bake textures into models but never ended up figuring out a solution. It’s a bit disappointing as the textures are what really sells each environment and even more frustrating because I’m sure the solution is simple. I guess that’s just how learning goes sometimes.
Here is an example of what I mean when I say “grid tile”. You can see that if I click on each object, it will only select a small square.
As much as I wanted to solve the texture issue, I had to move on. Once the FBX files where imported into Unity, I dragged them into my scene. My scene was created with the First Person Preset so luckily it had good movement built in. At first I wasn’t sure how I wanted to arrange my locations. At first I thought maybe it’s like you’re in a museum of Zach and each location is a different exhibit, then underneath each is the text description as to why it was important to me and why I included it. Maybe if this project was supposed to be bigger it would’ve worked but I realized that a museum with only 3 exhibits would be fairly underwhelming. As I was experimenting in the program, running around and looking at each scene, I realized something. The infinite environment that unity automatically puts you in was actually pretty on brand for my vision. If you are truly meant to be in my brain I feel like that IS an infinite room with memories scattered about. More specifically, if I was asked to consolidate ME into 3 locations, my brain would subconsciously generate the 3 different scenes, with a text description and then I would have to verbally explain what I was imagining. I found it very cool to think that what was once just a thought, generated and rendered in my brain, is now being visually expressed and rendered with code in such a way that the user can walk around and explore it like it’s another dimension.