Interactivity and Computation • 60-212
CMU School of Art / IDeATe, Spring 2022 • Prof. Golan Levin
I decided to learn Unity from the tutorial provided by Emmanuel Henri on LinkedinLearning. My original plan was to finish the tutorial and create a small project for myself using Unity, but my time is limited so I only finished the tutorial. Below is the screenshot of what I have done so far.
This gif is part of the kitchen walkabout I created following the tutorial. I know the lighting is currently very bad.
A rhythmic fighting game where you have to copy your opponent’s musical piece to reflect the damage back at them!
The closer you are to matching the notes the less damage you take and the more damage you deal.
The graphics are really bad right now and my goal is to make it much more visually appealing, this is just a proof of concept. I will also be adding more songs, multiple verse fights, menu systems and some other quality changes for the final submission on May 11th.
Devlog 1: May 11th Update
I have made quite a few quality of life changes already:
Future changes:
Bonus Goals:
Here is my final project for Metronome: https://lexloug.itch.io/metronome
You can access it using the link and the password: 60212, if that doesn’t work please message me. I also only built it for windows so if someone wants a mac version just let me know.
This is a fully completed demo that shows off how one combat would feel like. Though lacking in the artistic aspects, I believe it shows off my idea pretty well. Let me know if any bugs are found.
I was trying to learn GLSL but due to my lack of motivation, I ended up making a project in Blender instead. I lot of what I learned in GLSL actually helped in making this scene, since Blender’s shader nodes are very similar to visually programming GLSL. I tried to do most of this procedurally using the node system (besides the grass), the flowers are made using an SDF I found in the Book of Shaders. Besides GLSL, I tried to explore Blender’s features more such as using particle systems, procedural animation, and using the compositor. As this was kind of rushed I wish I put more details into the scene and used less bloom, but I liked how it turned out.
I spent my time catching up on past projects, and I worked on the telematic project and created a drawing website that has rooms.
These rooms would be used as prompts for people around the world to draw together from a Twitter bot account that would present a new prompt everyday. The Twitter account is @CollabDrawABCs and you can view it here.
These are some examples of drawings and drawing prompts. Each user gets assigned a color randomly, which is supposed to encourage collaboration between users. If a user is alone and would like a new color, they can just refresh the page, but the process is a lot faster with others.
For the final open studio project of the semester, I worked on catching up on all the assignments I missed due to my big junior year design assignment earlier in the semester. Below is a list of all the assignments I completed with links to view them. You can also view the posts I made on phases 1 2 3 4 of the final project here.
For my in-class presentation:
With Golan’s help, I’ve felt inspired to dip into my Persian identity for the creature/monster project and create something meaningful.
I’m a little early in my process, so I don’t have any big ideas jumping out at me quite yet, but I do have some great resources to help me get there.
First, is a project by Iranian artist Morehshin Allahyari called She Who Sees the Unknown. These images (which can be found here) are of a jinn named Huma who has three heads and two tails. The first two are inspiration/contextual images from books and the third is the installation she created.
I actually quite like the look of the book pages that she referenced, with the yellowing pages, the borders, and the text. I like that style a lot and may want to do something with that.
Morehshin has lots of really great examples of creatures from Persian/Islamic legends and mythology, which is really inspiring. There is also a Wikipedia page listing Persian legendary creatures which I’ve been looking at. I’m particularly inspired by a few, like the Bahamut which is a fish that holds up a bull that holds up an angel that holds up the world. It seems to be an Arab legend, not Persian, but I like it nonetheless.
I also really like Paris, who are beautiful, female spirits with wings.
Best for last… my absolute favorite is the Shahmaran, half woman… half SNAKE!!! What??? So cool.
I think I’m also going to ask my parents for their thoughts and see if they can help inspiration strike! The biggest question I have right now is… even if I can recreate one these creatures… how will I make them behave? That’s the important part of this project, of course, so I want to make sure I’m both inspired by how a creature looks/its history and also how it behaves!
List of Completed Assignments
Assignments to be Completed
I was working on procedural terrain generation for the first half of this project but because I found a really good package for that, there’s very little left for me to do apart from learning how to use that package. Since my goal was to learn unity, I decided to make something that requires more scripting. So I made a 3D in-game builder (the best way to explain it would be the combination of Kerbal Space Program’s user interaction combined with the mechanics of Minecraft.) I got to explore scripts, material, audio sources, UI, character controller, physics ray casting, box collider, and mesh renderer. The environment is the HDRP sample scene in Unity. It only took 150 lines of code for the builder and another 50 for a very naive character movement controller, which is quite amazing.
As mentioned in my FinalPhase2 post, I’ve been watching Snap Lens Studio tutorials on YouTube in order to achieve the desired effects. I have attached screenshots of two trials that I have experimented with. First, I was intrigued by the texture I saw in Aaron Jablonski’s work to play around with building different textures, especially those reminiscent of water. Secondly, I explored its 3d hand interaction module to induce particular phrases or animations based on the position of the hand. As of now, I think I will stick to my first trial to develop a certain virtual environment that the users could possibly be immersed in.
