I've never done any type of computer animation before so getting to learn and try out Unity is extremely exciting for me. With that said, I am satisfied with my first project but I am looking forward to learning more PlayMaker and making more complex and interesting scenes. For my project, I decided to do a picnic by the beach. Everyone knows that the whale is mandatory as well, so I through her in there too.

As far as what went well, I feel that I was really able to grasp the positioning and such of the objects. For my picnic scene, I put in a table, two chairs, two mugs, two plates, two candles, and a full chicken. If you check, all of them are either at ground level or exactly on top of the table. This took a lot of fidgeting around with but I am pleased with the final result. I feel I was also very able to handle the environment, as both my mountains, as well as the three different terrains I used, all came out well.

As far as things that didn't work, there were a couple of things. Mainly, I could not for the life of me get the sound to work spatially, that is increase in volume the closer you got. It would just play at full volume the whole time, no matter what I did. I made sure I attached it correctly to the whale, that I didn't have play on awake on, I adjusted my min and mix distance, I tried everything. I even changed the spatial blend, because I read online that would work, but no dice. If anyone else encountered a similar problem, I would love to hear how they fixed it. The other "mistake" I made is that even though we didn't need to have animations, I was going to add them, but I had already started my scene so importing PlayMaker would have messed it up.

I was unsure of what to do about the thought exercise, so I have decided to include it at the bottom of this blog post. I think that all types of stories could be created using this software, but I think a potentially powerful use of Unity could be in recreating events that happened in real life, so people that weren't there could experience them. For example, if they had a VR setup at the World Trade Center Museum, of perhaps the morning before the plane crashes or of the event itself, I feel it would definitely help visitors better connect to the experience.

As the user moves through the screen, it would be like them walking through Downtown Manhattan. There would be people walking around the user like normal city traffic. Once the user reached a certain area, it would trigger a plane to fly across the screen and hit a tower. You could attach a sound as well so that when the plane hit not only does it look like a horrifying crash it sounds like one too.

These elements of the story would be discovered by the user through the use of PlayMaker and the triggering of different events. Those events would only be triggered by the user reaching a certain location, allowing the user to discover for themselves the major events that are about to happen.