Callie’s Page


This is my blog from my first semester at ITP. I have since switched to a Notion blog which you can view here.


Fall 2024


Intro to Physical Comp:



Intro to Comp Media:



Hypercinema:






Final Project → Cornell Box



Assignment:

Create a Digital Cornell Box  

Think about the objects you place in your Cornell Box, what do these objects represent poetically, personally or metaphorically? How will you use animation, interactivity and real time environments to bring these objects to life? Will this be a screen based work? A mobile piece? A projected work? What sort of style or theme do you want your box to have?


Final Result:
















Process

Honestly this project doesn’t have a ton of artistic intent behind it beyond the aesthetics, which I think is okay for a first Unity project. Unity is hard! But I do think this project helped me understand it better and I feel equipped to take on projects with more interactivity in the future.

I started out being interested in terrariums/dioramas/fishtanks - maybe a surreal tank of some kind with interesting creatures swimming around. I really like the clay-like aesthetic of assets created with Womp, but I had never used it before. I took this assignment as an opportunity to play around with Womp.

I thought reef corals would translate especially well to virtual “clay,” and was able to model a little anemone-type guy. I then tried to import this test asset into Unity, and had a rude awakening about the difficulty of translating materials/shaders between different tools. 

I think most of the appeal of Womp is their beautiful-looking textures. I especially loved the more glass-like translucent materials. However, all I ever managed to display in Unity was the flat base colors. I tried a Blender tutorial that manages to capture some of the Womp aesthetic, but it wasn’t 100% there. 

Maybe there will be a way in the future to import their shaders and materials into different environments, but since Womp is such a new tool there’s not many tutorials out there yet. 

I decided to abandon this approach and pivot to an aesthetic that would translate better into Unity. 

Some inspiration from Pinterest


An asset I modeled in Womp
 



New inspiration: Vaporwave!

I think naturalistic textures are really hard to make look good in a game engine for someone at my skill level, so I decided to lean into the computer-generated look. I created a new mood board, taking a trip down memory lane back to 2015:



“Vaporwave” uses a lot of blocky shapes and neon lighting for dramatic effect. This 90s/2000s-inspired aesthetic invokes early 3D rendering, bowling alleys, and eerie swimming pools covered in white subway tile.

My new idea was a surreal greenhouse floating in space. I primarily wanted to experiment with custom materials, building my own architecture, and importing assets - maybe some light interactivity if time permitted.



Creating the architecture

I used Blockout, a free prototyping asset kit to construct the building using primitive shapes.

This was pretty time intensive, because I soon found out that stretching assets in Unity is not a good idea unless you want the material to look warped (which is obviously an issue for a square tile material). So I duplicated lots of blocks and aligned them instead. 

I also found that it was important to use precise math rather than manually placing elements, otherwise there will be small gaps/misalignment that become obvious, especially with the stark material I was using. 






Materials / shaders

Getting the right tile material was a much bigger challenge than I thought (mostly because I’m picky). It was surprisingly difficult to find a free, high-quality white subway tile, but I finally found one that I loved. 

The catch was that it is a PBR material, which (I think) is more specialized because it can be procedurally generated? The technical distinctions went over my head, but I deduced that it requires a special plugin from Adobe Substance designer to work with. Luckily, this tutorial was helpful.

The PBR customizability is pretty cool - you can see all the settings I could control through the plugin in the image. 

For the glass and water materials, I lifted them from some models on the Assets store. 

I still don’t think I’m using the water material correctly, you might notice that the quality of light being reflected in the video looks strange - shaders still confuse me, but I think it has something to do with that. Something for further learning.  









Finishing touches

I modeled a dome in Fusion360 to use as the glass top of my greenhouse, and then added some hallmark vaporwave touches: palm trees, purple neon lighting, an eerie glowing doorway, and a space background. 

I recorded a video using the provided Cinemachine and Recorder tutorials.

I’m pretty happy with how the final result looks! 



Takeaways 

I only scratched the surface of Unity, and I want to learn a lot more when it comes to scripting and interactivity in the future. Unity feels like a whole new language, but I’m starting to see the underlying structure and principles. But overall, I’m proud I made something that I think looks pretty cool! 

I hit many technical snags when importing assets from the Internet, and I’m so unfamiliar with the software and 3D tools in general that it felt really hard to know where to begin troubleshooting or looking for tutorials. I should have made better use of office hours/resident help, but it was easier to play the numbers game and keep downloading assets until I found the ones that worked. Things got a lot easier with the Sketchfab for Unity plugin that I found!  

I’m definitely going to keep learning Unity because I find the storytelling potential very compelling. 


Assets/tools used: