GitHub Personal Profile: https://github.com/ZoiGalanidpsd19014
Digital-Storytelling-Individual-Assignment: https://github.com/ZoiGalanidpsd19014/Digital-Storytelling-Individual-Assignment
Hello this is my report about the animation assignment for my Uni. This is the first time I am using Unity and to be honest, i am pretty excited since I want to get into animation and game developement/ graphic designer in the near future. So this class is very exciting for me! :)
So as I said before, this is an animation project using the Unity programm. The theme I was going for is a city resembling NYC. If you'll look at the mp4 videos of each deliverable you will see that some props that were not supposed to be there for the 1st deliverable are shown, that's because I went ahead and started putting props and details that are not required for the requirements for the 1st deliverable. Makes sense? Basically I stayed and built a lot of stuff before i made the 1st mp4.
Regarding the first deliverable, i started it right away in the class, I mean using the Unit1_StarterFiles. I made some buildings here and there using the ProBuilder tool as described in the UNIT2 tutorials we were using in our class. At home, i made more buildings and used the ProBuilder to make their shapes more complex, with different sizes, edges, faces.
At the same time, i downloaded some images (jpg) from the interet for the texture/material i was going to put on the buildings to make them look more like "buildings" for ex. having windows. I made the materials with the images in unity and put them in the asset/materials folder.
Then i started applying the materials to the buildings. Since i had made a lot of buildings with different sizes, I had to duplicate the same materials on or two times in order to change the tiling that seemed more aproppriate for the specific building- in order to make you understand a material with x tiling to a tall building looked streched/compressed/ dissorted to another shorter building. So i had to make a mataerial for the tall, and another woth different tiling for the other and so on. Also i played a little with the offset of the material in order to match where the texture is more realistic to be. In some buildings I also made a base with a plain color material to indicate 'this is the ground floor' but i honestly didn't do it for all the buildings. As i was making the buildings i tried to make stairs and doors for them but unfortunately they were too big for the ratio i was trying to achieve, so i didn't put any doors (imagine that a door from the probuilder at the smallest size looked huge for the bulding/material, but i managed to put stairs!
So i duplicated a lot of the buildings I've madeand started putting them in blocks like multi-highrises. (there is a big mixup with the nams in hierarchy bc i did blocks of buildings and not multihighrises so i will solve this later).
I rotated the building, changed the scale however i wanted to but tried to make them all have the same distance from the road -I'll explain it in the 2nd deliverable- in order to make the idea that there is a pavement between the buildings and the roads.
For the 2nd part, i started making the props i was going to use. The first prop i created was the watertank. In NYC you will notice that some buildings have watertanks on the roof, so i went and made that. I used basic shapes like cylinders and cubes and wtih a little roating, scaling and placements i made the base that consists of the legs (cubes), the main body (cylinder with a notch upwards like a cone) and the ladder (cylinders).
Another area that i used 2 props was the park
For starters I made a plane with a grass texture/material to resemble grass.
Then i made a path with a plane that connects the 2 ends of the park, putting a color material onto it.
Then i made a wall with a scaled cube and I put a brick texture/material on it. Then i duplicated it and put it on the other side of the park, so now I have 2 brick walls.
After that I made the fences, basically I made a fence by alligning and duplicating a lot of rotated and scaled cylinders, and with the help of the duplicate tool I put 4 fences, with an open entrance/exit.
In the park, I made a lake by adding a capsule shape, rotated it and cut the faces of the upper half. Then I filled the hole by the edges so I was left with a half-capsule. I painted it blue with a material and placed it just below the grass plane.
Now, I imported from the Unity Asset store some free models of benches, trees and grass(credits at the end of the page). I duplicated them and put them in the park.
Leaving the park behind, I made the roads. I made a prefab of a road using only planes, scaling them and assigning them color.
I organised the road to 2 sections: the AVES that are parallel and are only 2, at the edges of the city
and the streets, that are too parallel between them with one vertical
I made some pedestrian crossings using planes and assigned them to their parents ave or street they belong to
In one ave I made 2 bus lanes using again duplicated planes with a red color material.
And now for the other props I imported from the Asset Store are the cars and buses. I probably used 2 models of cars and I made some variations of them by assigning them a specific color; ex white car, blue car, yellow car (taxi), black car and so on. The bus model I painted it with a blue color material.
The props for the people/humans are from the Unit4 files 'HumanoidBody'. I placed them to the asset files and then placed them in my scene. I put the models at the x,y,z points I wanted in my scene and then placed them as animation clips to the timeline. I changed the track offsets to scene offsets, and then I put the animation from the same folder (HumanoidWalk) to the Animation Clip. din't need to do an override animation with this model, since they already moved the way I wanted.
The prop that I made myself using Blender is the street light.
I imported it to Unity and into the scene. I made a spotlight under the lamp and duplicated it to the near and oppossite street.
Daileys
224663683-6bc3436a-6ccc-4865-9ef7-7d04f80fd8f2.mp4
Props_movie3.mp4
final_take1.mp4
For the second deliverable, I started with the lights from Unit 6. I deleted the directional light from the scene, but even then, the lighting was not as dark as i wanted, so I went Window>Rendering>Lighting>Environment to change the settings there and chose an environment that was darker, like the one used in the class's units. After that, I closed the light bulb from the scene and started adding lights to my scene. I made a folder named LIGHTS and started by adding point lights. I made a few, played with the range, color and intensity and put them at the streets close to the buildings. I made sure to change the setting from auto to important because else the light would not show in the scene.
I changed the spotlights in the bulbs with the same mindset, changing the range and the lens? and casting the setting to important. I had a problem with this, as the lights would not show everytime, seeing it was affected by each other. So that is why some lights show and some not.
I wanted to make a lamp go on and off, so I put the spotlight of that lamp in the timline as an activation track. I scaled down the active time and duplicated so the lamp went on and off.
For the VFX I used both methods shown in the unit7 tutorial. I made a VFX file in the assets and one in the hierarchy. I wanted to make a smoke particle, so I followed the tutorial (Add->Effects->Particles) so then it was just playing with the settings to create the desirable smoke particle I wanted. I made 3 particles in the hierchy using duplicating and with a little positioning and rotating I put them up to the buildings as I wanted them.
Aside the smoke particles, I wanted to make a spark particles in the lamp that was blinking. In the VFX file in the assets I made an effect file and as shown in the tutorial and renamed it to SPARKS.
I created new nodes from the SYSTEM menu and then i just played with the settings, trying to figure what did what and how i could make it like i imagined it.
After the particles were right, I putted them in a lamp where i would later focus my camera on as a scene to the timeline. So with 3 smoke particles with method one and a spark particle with method 2, the VFX part was over.
For the sound, I downloaded some city sounds from youtube converted the file to .wav and imported it to a folder named SFX I made in the assets folder.
I followed the settings as shown in the unit7 tutorial and managed to have the background music playing while the scene rolled.
I went ahead and made an audio mixer to chenge the background music in some places with the parameq effect.
Later, I downloaded another audio file with the same method, and I made a mixer for it too. I applied the echo and lowpass effects.
For the cinemacine part, I downloaded from the package manager the cinemacine pack. I then went to the camera and added the component "cinemachine brain".
<Then I created some virtual cameras in the hierarchy.
I recorded a timeline section with each virtual camera using the camera shots. In virtual camera 3, instead of doing the snapshot, I put the car in my scene at the FOLLOW and LOOK AT option, so the camera could follow the car from behind.
For the title I downloaded the Text Media Pro & Text Media Pro Extra (Fonts only). I went to Assets>TextMeshPro>Examples & Extras> Fonts and created a Font Asset on Bangers. Then I created an UI object in the hierarchy window for the TextMeshPro.
I put the title in the sequence:
Frame 0 - Alpha 0
Frame 20 - Alpha 250
Frame 81 - Alpha 250
Frame 89 - Alpha 0
For the fade in - fade out effect I put a black image on the hierarchy and in the settings I stretched it so it covered the whole game view.
For the timeline sequence I put the image:
Frame 0 - Alpha 250
Frame 10 - Alpha 0
Frame 438 - Alpha 0
Frame 466 - Alpha 250
(For the Unit5 deliverable, I deleted the VFX, SFX, LIGHTS, TITLE, IMAGE in order to record it. For Unit6, I recorded the scene with normal camera view, no cinamchine. For Unit7, of course I applied all the above.)
unit5final.mp4
unit6.mp4
unit7final.mp4
For the last deliverable, I decided to apply a last VFX with an SFX pair, which are a rainfall ParticleSystem and a rain/thunder SoundEffect. I made a particle system in the VFX hierarchy and renamed it Rainfall. Then I made these settings:
Then for the SFX I went to youtube and found a video with the sound effect I wanted (link down) and after converting it to a wav file, I imported it to the SFX folder like the other audios. I made a new audio source and put the file there. I played around with the volume in the 3 audios, since i didn't wante them all equally loud.
I made changes on the enviroment too, chainging the lighting, the fog etc.
3RDDELIV.mp4
#Conclusions
I am pretty happy with my project, some major stuff I would love to have done better are:
- How to make better materials for the buildings, since in mine they are stretched and not in the right ratio.
- How to use the audio mixer more effectively
- How to apply particles with material in collision to the rain. (I've made the material and the settings for it, but it would show only pink squares that I think it has to do with the render pipeline idk).
BUS PROP (bus):
https://assetstore.unity.com/packages/3d/vehicles/land/uaa-city-props-vehicles-120339
PARK PROPS (benches, trees, grass):
https://assetstore.unity.com/packages/3d/props/parks-and-nature-pack-lite-77362
CARS:
https://assetstore.unity.com/packages/3d/vehicles/land/stylized-vehicles-pack-free-150318
Music SFX https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RrBFxFZmWlY
Rain SFX https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7Vc4-FDGBxo
Background SFX https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N9jSdfxCdeE