Project 1: Introduction to a Realtime 3D Engine

This week's project was an activity involving learning the basic elements of using the Unity game engine. This included creating simple assets in 3D (using Autodesk Maya), importing these assets into Unity and then using them to explore some of the attributes Unity allows users to implement into game environments. I decided to explore Unity and its tools by creating a small skate park. This skate park involves a half pipe, quarter pipe, rail, etc; many of the essential pieces to a regular skate park. I also created a skateboard for the player to navigate through the skate park. When creating this game environment, I had to make use of Unity's importing methods (for the 3D assets and their textures), collision tools, cameras and player controls.
Most of this was relatively simple to learn and implement within Unity. Importing all of my assets was simple enough, although some of the 3D meshes I had deleted within the scene in Autodesk Maya reappeared when the scene was imported into Unity. I wasn't sure how to stop this happening so i just sifted through the scene once in Unity and deleted these unwanted objects. For most of the objects in the environment, mesh colliders were good enough to create basic collision detection. Although, for the skateboard I used a wheel collider and a mesh collider caused it to half sink through other meshes in the environment. Once all of the 3D assets were imported and collision detection was set up, I parented the skateboard to a camera for the player's perspective and applied a basic movement script to the skateboard. To get the skateboard to rotate instead of strafing left to right across the screen I had to edit the movement script (with some outside help seeing as I'm not a programmer) to allow the player to use the mouse to rotate the skateboard. The skateboard doesn't rotate perfectly, but it's good enough for now. After completing all of this, I created the executable file for a playable version of this game.

Below is a screenshot of the skate park game environment: