For my independent learning, I watched the Lynda tutorial on Unity Essentials and WOW was it helpful. In this tutorial you learnt everything from, starting a project to adding animation to baking lighting. I really regret waiting so long to do it because I could have fine tuned my skills by leaps and bounds if I had done this earlier on in the semester. Nonetheless, I focused primarily on the designing and constructing the game level section because it went over the nitty gritty of terrain design. I applied my learning to my final project in many ways. First, I applied it by learning how to accurately and efficiently place grass and trees. For example, from the video I learnt that you should keep your opacity for grass extremely low and not use the huge blob circle paintbrush as an applicator because in real life grass is never packed that heavily together and usually had holes. Using this knowledge, I was able to create a much more realistic looking terrain than I 've have before. Furthermore, I knew that in order to make your ground look realistic you need to layer it with different colors and patterns but I never knew the extent in which you had to layer. The Lynda tutorial taught me that painting terrain is an extremely, long detailed process and that's what took most of my time when doing the final project. I tried my best to be very strategic with my color layering and making sure the colors I chose 1. matched the actual place I wanted to recreate and 2. if it made sense. In terms of "making sense" I mean that, usually, large rocks have longer pieces of grass next to them or that trees have dirt next to their roots so you can't just have grass if youre going to have a tree, you need to paint on dirt. I also learned how to make my project actually proportional to real life and to one another. Before the tutorial I never understood that unity worked in meters so I was putting arbitrary numbers when I was sizing my assets or just choosing what "looked right." Based on the video, the instructor said that people are usually .7 meters tall so I made my FPC that height, and it actually made a difference. Furthermore, when I was choosing the size of my grass or plants I no longer had to guess how tall or how wide  to make them because I could look up the average height of blank plant in meters. I also learned that I could resize my terrain - as silly as that may sound. I was always under the impression that my scene had to be made on an overwhelmingly huge 500 x 500 terrain but, in reality, that's not the case at all! You can make your terrain as big or small as you want. Ultimately, watching these tutorials was game changing. I almost feel like watching this tutorial should be obligatory in the beginning of or throughout the semester. Nonetheless, I encourage anyone taking the VR Storytelling class to do the individual learning ASAP because it makes unity and everything else that you're doing throughout the semester make so much more sense and you'll be able to make your scenes that much better.