Category: Virtual World Building

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.

So after learning how to download 3D models off google maps I ran into some problems with my original idea. I wanted it to be a POV view of the whole town where you could just walk around as if you were actually there. Some of my problems were:

1. The program only downloads a smallish rectangle of google map information at a time, you can’t just zoom out and download an entire town. Luckily the rectangle is big enough to download key features, like Beaver Stadium, or the Spikes Baseball Field. I thought maybe I cold just download some of the more recognizable parts of the town and then format them together in Unity. But still another problem yet.
2. The 3D models look best from above as the images are taken from satellites. When you are looking at a 3D model from the side you can see that the textures are a bit morphed, stretched and blurry.
3. My last issue is that I want the perspective to be a POV as if you are walking around, but then I realized State College is so big that you would have to have super speed, or the ability to fly. I don’t really like super speed and I would love to make it a game where you fly around a real life environment but unfortunately I don’t know how to program flying in Unity and feel it might be overly ambitious for this project.

Finally, a solution to all.

Alright so at the beginning of the project Pierre told me that I don’t necessarily have to make it about my hometown, he said it could be something more abstract or maybe something more meaningful to me. This just now gave me the idea to make it more about ME than my hometown. Of course the hometown will still be apart because my hometown in definitely a part of me, but now it will also include more meaningful features that give a deeper look into who I am.

My new idea is this:

You are a character walking on a planet. The planet resembles earth, but more so, its Zach’s earth. My Earth is not the same as your Earth. For example, on my earth Pennsylvania is huge, it’s a place where you can drive all day and never leave the state. Its a place filled with people I know and lifestyles I relate to. Its a place that might not even exist on someone else’s earth. On Zach’s earth there would be different landmarks that left an impact on me. For example, when I was 15 my family took a big trip out west and visited a lot of national parks. They were all beautiful but Zion National Park stood out to me the most. Anytime someone asks me “Where would you love to go for vacation”, I always include Zion in my answer. Zach’s earth would include a lot of different locations that have been a big part of my life. You would be able to walk around and see each of them and read a quick description of why I included it and how it was a part of my life. Unfortunately, as I don’t know how to fly in Unity I think I will make all the locations miniature versions of themselves so you can get a top down view (something google map models excel in) as well as not waste time traveling between them. Maybe I could correlate their size with the impact they had on me.

Here is a 3D view of Angels Landing, a popular hiking trail at Zion National Park. I would definitely include this as one of my landmarks.

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.