Creating a Natural Landscape in Unity
This week, we’ve focused on creating a digital world for users to experience in VR. I decided to try and create a natural mountain scene to do a virtual hike in. I knew nothing about how to create a world in Unity before this week, and I had a ton of fun getting it to look realistic with hints of surrealism with the terrain I worked on.
To start, I did some tutorial videos on how to work with the terrain. After getting the tools down for raising and lowering terrain, I downloaded a few assets from the Unity Asset Store to introduce different elements: ground, grass, sand, scree, two types of trees, three types of flowers and grasses, clouds, and a daytime water element for ponds and lakes.
After I got my scene looking more or less done, I then introduced the FPSController. Luckily this worked fine for me, as I was able to walk around with my character around the mountain scene. I soon realized I needed to flatted the surface a bit more so the character could walk easier.
I tried added some different walking sounds to make it sound like it was actually walking through grass. I took a youtube video of someone walking in grass, edited the clip so that each step was one “crunch” sound in the grass. I added a fun guitar “wah” sound for every time they jump, and when they land it’s another fun guitar sound.
Thinking about how this would translate to a VR experience, I added a character at the bottom of the map that the user would try to find when being introduced into the world.
The scene starts with you being dropped from the sky onto the top of the mountain, and the goal is to try and find our blue friend in the map.
A couple of tips for finding our friend: try to stick on the sand path, and follow the flowers. Look for the red flowers, and they will guide you to our blue friend, who is standing in a patch of red flowers under the shade of conifer trees. Be careful on the jagged rocks and jump carefully! Don’t fall in the water, because I don’t know if you’ll be able to get out.
Check out my walkthrough video if you want to see how it’s done!
