Based on the feedback from the presentation, I improved several suggestions for this project. Firstly, I tried to revise the multiple seasons display issue due to some feedback expressing the storyline was slightly confusing. As the first view of the tree, some feedback suggested building the precise details to guide players to understand from the tree perspective. Therefore, I modelled flowers and plants in Blender and created animations by shape keys. The primary goal of these plants I made was for the spring and summer, which I might think to insert more vivid growing plants into the virtual space to guide more immersions. I modelled these plants, added multiple shape keys to each leaf and petal, and then added the action editor to modify the bloom and growing timeline for each leaf and petal. As a result, the individual plant had a separate animation. I exported the fbx models with animation from Blender to Unity and then used the Unity animator controller to trigger the plants’ animations.
Models
Spring
I made the change based on Xiyue Huang’s original skybox controller function and adjusted the timespan, which displays 60 now. And I created one new skybox to replace the skybox3. I changed the skybox1 and skybox2 previous skybox settings. Xinyue Lin created several different skyboxes, and I still used the two from her creation and used the new I built because I considered the sky colour tone might be different for the three seasons.I added the grass growing fbx and animation and most of the flowers fbx and animations in spring for this project. The grass would start to grow after the rain, and I revised the skybox change duration, which would change every 60 seconds.
Summer
In the summer, I planned to improve by using particles here and the original animal animations were made by Jiayao Wang. But I could not trigger the animals’ animation and did not figure out why. Therefore I mainly added the original animals’ fbx and used mostly VFX Graph to create the summer’s vivid atmosphere.
Winter
In the winter, I improved the snow effects and enlarged the fire area and time duration to create visual effects for participators to understand earlier from “the tree’s perspective. Meanwhile, I added smaller trees with leaves growing animations to guide participators to comprehend the nutrition transited to the smaller trees, which led, the more leaves growing. ¬Besides, I added the snow leaf shader graph and snow shader graph. The snow leaf shader graph is built on Xiyue Lin’s leaf shader graph. I created the top snow and ice effects to add to the tree’s leaves to make the scene to be recognized easier. And the snow shader graph is used to cover the other components in the scene to look at the snow particles.
Snow leaf shader graph
references:
learn how to make a snow shader from:
https://www.bilibili.com/video/BV12S4y1X7ux/?spm_id_from=333.337.search-card.all.click&vd_source=ca058f8010cad699640c32ba92c0f911
Smaller tree growing animation inspiration coming from:
https://www.bilibili.com/video/BV1mu411X78g/?spm_id_from=333.788.recommend_more_video.2&vd_source=ca058f8010cad699640c32ba92c0f911
Learn how to make the plants growing effects in Blender by shape key from:
https://www.bilibili.com/video/BV1aY411G7bk/?spm_id_from=333.337.search-card.all.click&vd_source=ca058f8010cad699640c32ba92c0f911
