Julian Schoenbohm

First of all, this was my very first time working with Unity or 3D in general. I was really fascinated how easy it is to work with and how fast you will get good results.

Since I am a huge fan of Utah and its beautiful landscape I wanted to build a terrain that is similar to it.

The scene you can see in the video shows a small town in the rural areas of Utah. There are some apartments, a farm, office buildings, a park where people can hang out, a school and a church. In the background, you can see some skyscrapers who are placed on a mountain.

The character of the story is strolling around in town until he sees that there was an accident on one of the main streets in the city. Two cars crashed into each other and caught fire. The character is becoming aware of this mainly by the sound of the helicopter and the sirens of the police cars. After leaving the accident site, the character notices that there are coins scattered all over the street. After a while he realizes that the coins seem to lead somewhere. He is following the coins and arrives at the church. A creepy man tells him that he should not be here and leave the place. The man is standing next to tons of stacked gold bars. The character leaves the place and runs. He realizes that there was a bank robbery in town and the bandit had an accident and tried to hide from the police.

I really enjoyed working with Unity after a couple of minutes. There are tons of useful assets in the Asset Store that help you to build a huge scene in a very short time. Instead of just building a small scene with a couple of objects, I was very interested in building a whole town with a lot of details.

Working with different objects and assets from the store worked pretty well. Unfortunately, some objects were not available for the version we are using in class and some were not available for free.

When using a lot of different objects from the asset store, you will sometimes notice differences in the size of the objects. However, the feature of scaling them makes it very easy to adjust them in size so that they fit to the other objects used in the scene.

I also tried to use some animations for the fire, the horse or the helicopter. At the beginning, this was a little bit difficult. Fortunately, Unity provides you with a lot of useful tutorials to learn how to use them.

Adding sound to different objects is actually pretty easy. At the beginning, there were some problems because of another “audio listener” that was activated at the main camera. This has led to not being able to hear the actual sounds of the objects. After deactivating it, everything worked out pretty well. For most of the sounds I used loops, so that the sound can be heard all the time. However, I am still wondering how it is possible to let an object play a sound only once, for example when standing right in front of it.

After using Unity for a while, I still had the feeling that the controls slow down the workflow when you are in the scene mode and building your environment. Switching between the grab tool for moving the whole terrain and the select tool for placing objects all the time, just slows down the whole process.

I am still wondering if and how it is possible to use different first-person controllers. I had this one car from the asset store which was controllable. Unfortunately, it was not possible to control the car independently from the moving of the character itself. However, the car could still be used in the scene after deactivating its C#-script which was responsible for its controls.

Although I did not try to produce some kind of mini game, I still wanted to tell a story that takes place in the city. Sound and its ability to be located with 3D sound, can really push a story forward. In addition to that, text that can give instructions could also be a good way to guide someone through the story.

In a scene like this, I think there are a lot of different ways to make a story special. The different stories vary depending on what the experiencer has to accomplish. Is it a scene where the experiencer actually has to solve a specific task like in a video game? Or is it a scene where he is just travelling to another place and experiencing the place by strolling around like in Google Earth?

I think both ways would work pretty well. I would consider my scene as something in between.