After seeing the Ureal and Maya demo in class, I have a better understanding of what is possible when starting out. I have come up with a fourth, more concrete idea that brings in elements from my previous three ideas.
I am thinking of making a labyrinth that starts with high walls that deteriorate as the labyrinth continues, to the extent that they are reduced to pebbles at the end. At first, I wanted to add in other changing element such as plants that either become overgrown or die as the maze continues. I wanted to position these in such a way so that if you entered the labyrinth from the other side it would have the opposition effect - it would appear as though the walls were being built and the plants were growing/blooming or being cultivated. Logistically, I was thinking I could put the plants in little nooks so that you see different plants from different directions. With this idea I would get to bring in elements from my three ideas above: 1) changes in scale 2) suggestion of the passage of time and 3) dualities.
I started working on this in Unreal and Maya following the tutorial our professor made for us. First, I used illustrator to outline my maze design and then imported it into Maya where I rotated and extruded it. I used one of the demo people to make sure it was the height I wanted.
I also fixed the UV pattern so that it was uniform. I ran into a roadblock here when I the UV pattern didn’t show up even though it was working in the UV menu. I talked to my professor Jonathan about it and it turned out it was a view setting on the display! This has been what has been most challenging about this software so far - I don’t know what any of the buttons do or what any of the possibilities even are or what to google to fix it!
Next, I made a new level in Unreal, imported my maze into Unreal and re-sized it.
I placed my first person character in the maze and practiced walking around to see how it might feel in VR.
BTW - I hate that the gun is the default!
With learning the ins and outs of this new software, this was as far as I got this week!