Change of Pace

After all, I do that every day in real life, I needed a little sumpin-sumpin to redirect my mindset for a while. One of the things I do like to watch on YouTube are the videos of long boating in the UK. Having owned a boat, I do realize that you are probably seeing mostly the glamour side of that fence, but many of the videos also portray some of the more difficult challenges of boat life as well. My first reaction was "where are the bugs, spiders and snakes?". These creatures are inherent to the water environment, providing a constant battle for domain. This did however sparked my interest in creating a VR form form the same (sans critters for now). Even if I only use it myself, it would provide me a similar experience and some relaxation while navigating these VR boats around the canals of the VR version of the UK. Destination was somewhat irrellevant, so it was pretty much - eenie, meanie, miney "Wales". My initial build using a purchased longboat asset from the Unity Store was basically a test run using the provided terrain but with additional canals, buildings and boat stuff added. I will provide a link to the asset because it saved me a lot of time not having to do some of the scripting for floating, driving and examples. East Harbinger I named this town East Harbinger and it is a fictional location. For the second scene however, I actually created overlay maps of destinations and canals in Wales near Liverpool to make the map slightly more realistic. It will not be to scale because after reviewing the actual maps, the canals are probably way too complicated for this simple project. It starts in Llangollen and navigates north towards the direction of Liverpool. Once I have the terrain mapped out with the overlay map, I simply disable it. It took a little bit of trenching time, but I was able to create a simple canal route using this method. I need to drive the entire map to make sure I don't have any terrain obstacles under the water line. First time out I got stranded. heh. Creating Cityscapes Some time back, I had looked into creating 3D models of objects for skylines using blender. It is fairly simple using Blender and OpenStreetMap.com maps. This way, not only did I have a fairly decent representation of the map, I also had the ability to city scape some of the scenery as you navigated the canals. All in all, it has been about two weeks of work, but I actually find it enjoyable to navigate these boats across the country sides of VR-ville.