Graphics of the Environment

Since we had decided to create a painting/spraying game, we were somewhat limited in scope to what graphical effects we could work on. What we mean by this is that the painting canvas was a fixed object that could be painted on and the background was supposed to be a static backdrop with walls or something similar. To address the issue with the individual graphics assignment and utilizing the Unity engine so that we could possibly include our individual graphics work into the scene, we decided to turn the background into scenic view of a beautiful landscape environment. Doing this would make the possibilities for each individual assignment and what could be done nearly limitless, since there are so many graphical effects, themes, and the like to choose from to augment in the scene. If each team member for some reason could not add their work to scene, we always had a basic foundation to fall back to.

We started out by making this basic background nature scene, the initial foundation, from which we could work with further and enhance. The basic scene looked fairly well and was passable, and it was this scene that utilized when we presented the project demo during the hello world demo session. This initial environment or scene contained a basic landscape, with grassy texture for the hillside and rocky texture for the mountainous region, with snowy textures for the mountain peaks. A camera was placed near the top of the grassy hill overlooking the scenery behind the canvas painting. The position of the camera was important to the capture the right frame so that the scenery gave a good impression, and this was continually tweaked as more assets were added to the scene. Basic unity water with no animation was added, along with trees, undergrowth, bushes, rocks, and grass. A wind zone and a sound source were added to make the trees sway in the wind and sound could be heard, along with the sound of birds. All of this constituted the basic scene and the foundation that sufficed for the purpose of the demo. But all of these components and more could be added or augmented for the individual assignment. And this is what was was done for the final presentation for the open house.

We also wanted to show a the differences in environment and the lighting during day/night cycle. So we modeled the behaviour of the sun and also have blended between two skyboxes using "SkyboxBlended" shader. We also tried to make the lighting look more natural and scenic. Inorder to get the realistic rendering of water we have used Water FX pack and it pretty much worked out