Unity Terrain Tutorial Finished in September, 2009.
When I started this project I had only a marginal understanding of the work flow and possibilities of Unity. But I knew that I wanted to devote my time and efforts into understanding as much of the software that I could.
After developing a strong working knowledge of Unity’s terrain and atmospheric effects systems I assembled a detailed series of video tutorials documenting my process and the tools for developing a basic environment inside Unity. I had a blast learning the ins and outs of Unity's terrain system.
All of the assets are from Unity’s Standard Assets and Terrain Assets packages. All compilation and Unity editor work was completed by myself, as was all video editing.
I was happy to release these video tutorials into the Unity development community where I received many encouraging and thankful comments.
The direct link to the Vimeo album is here.
The link to the Unity Forum thread is here.
Toy Inspector Toy Inspector was completed in May, 2009.
Toy Inspector was developed as a tool for a psychology graduate student at Ohio University and was used as a psychology experiment. The application recorded user input (mouse clicks, rate of completion, choices that were made) as well as the answers to a survey at the end of the experiment.
My task for the project was to enable the application to save the compiled data from the Flash application, running as a standalone, to a secure server site. This was accomplished by encoding the data on the ActionScript side and sending it to a series of PHP files that decoded and then stored the data to a text file.
As a non-programmer this was quite difficult, but I am always up for a challenge. I have found that nearly everything is possible with enough time and dedication.
While my participation on this project was not centered around asset creation or implementation, I feel that it was a good test of my flexibility and problem solving skills. --Plus the designer of the experiment wanted the style of the application to 'be bland and boring overall', so I was fine with not working on the art. -- During the pitch of the project I was concerned that saving data out of a Flash application may be impossible or at least impractical. But the entire experiment hinged on this feature. We had tried to do something similar during the production of Blazar (see Games page) and figured out a workaround that let us save and retrieve data within the system, but it was unreadable by the user.
In the end I was able to deliver the tech necessary to allow the application to work as desired, and I am glad that I took on the challenge.
