Chinese Spring Festival Museum – Final Project

I. Final Presentation

II. Presentation Pictures

(Because I was presenting during the show, so I didn’t take too much pictures)

III. Technical Process and Conceptual Approach 

During the working process, our group changed the idea a lot. After we decide on the “Spring Festival” topic, we first plan to create an interactive movie to compare the original and nowadays festival. However, after one day’s working and we found that it is too hard for us to learn how to control a character in unity, which should be a big part of the movie. In this case, we quickly changed our idea to create an online museum. 

The museum is designed to be separated into four rooms, and each of us shoulders one room’s decoration. My room is the Firework room and I also shouldered the responsibility to create the opening and the initial museum room. 

a. The Fireworks Room

The basic idea of these fireworks is to let the player create fireworks on their own, to create some festival atmosphere in the silent city. 

At first, I researched the particle system, trying to create the firework effect on my own. However, Kaitlyn helped me to find a brilliant firework model on Taobao, and I used them at last. The model we bought has a total of twenty fireworks prefabs, and I chose eight of them to let the users click on and play. For this part, I used the UI system, that is creating the canvas and bottom, and replaced the bottom with the fireworks pictures. The pictures are the screenshot of the prefabs preview, and to make it fitter with the VR environment, I also used photoshop to make the pictures more stereoscopic. At last, to make it more convenient for the users to operate, I linked the canvas with the VR camera, so that it can move with the user’s sight.

Although it is a small detail, to make the city more feel like a festival environment, I changed all the light colors in this model into a warmer colors. Before there were lots of blue and white lights, and I changed them all into red and yellow. If there were more times, I would like to make more festival decorations on it.

As for the UI system, it is here that I learned how to create canvases and buttons and make it can interact in the VR world. It also creates the foundation for me to make other interactions between different rooms. Here is the video that I learn on: UI Using Unity XR Interaction Toolkit | How to Make a User Interface That Works in VR

b. The Opening

Although the opening scene is very short, it is still a very important part of our project, for it introduced the basic background of our project. I create a modern city first to represent nowaday’s city, and when the camera is moving, there is also audio saying that “This year’s Spring Festival is still boring”, and “I wish I can hear fireworks and eat dumplings with families together” and so on, showing the background that there is not a lot of festival atmosphere nowadays. When the camera zoom in, we can see a red room with the title “Spring Festival Museum”, letting the players know that we create this museum to show we yearn for the previous festival atmosphere.

Still a small detail, but I also create long posters and add them to the original city model, so that we can have a feeling: this city is also celebrating the festival, but doesn’t have any festival atmosphere. Also, I didn’t change the light color in this model, also trying to show the comparison that there is no festival atmosphere except the posters.

Also, the animation of the camera that makes it fly above the city to the museum feels really different in the VR world, it gives us an immersive feeling of flying above the city, which is pretty cool and fun. 

c. The Museum Room

This is a really simple setup with four posters representing our exhibition room. For this room, I create a simple room set up with materials and lights, making it just the same as an ordinary museum room in the real world. However, this is also a special point we want to show in this project, which is the unique point of the VR museum. In the real world, the museum is made up of various rooms with different showpieces. However, in the VR museum, the museum room is only one small room, but you can explore different things by clicking on it. And without letting the audience go into another room, the space is totally different after the audience chooses the showpiece, which is another interesting point we think of in our project.

To keep our rooms in one style, we also choose similar-style posters, and if there are more times, we would like to add beautiful and same-style names to our rooms.

Also, here is the scene where I learn how to change the scene with the buttons, which is also helpful for me to add the “exit” button in the exhibition rooms. Here’s the link that I reference:

https://blog.csdn.net/dislike_carry/article/details/126800139, https://blog.csdn.net/alayeshi/article/details/40344907

d. Link Four Rooms

As the one who has the best computer in this group, I also shouldered the responsibility to link each other’s rooms into a complete project. Not to say the debug project, I also pay a lot of attention to making the scenes into one similar style. The first is to unify the subtitles that everyone made. I changed the UI text into the UI textmeshpro, so that the words can be seen clearly, and I also unified the front that we use. Also, since the subtitle we create is actually the words that our Fu director speaking of, I choose the dialog box picture to be the background of the words, trying to spread the meaning of there is a director leading the audience to look around.

Also, although not knowing why there are bugs with everyone’s VR settings, I copy and paste my VR camera into everyone’s scene to solve the problem, also linked the Fu director with every scene’s camera, and add the exit bottom to every room. It’s not a complex process, but do cost me time to build the scene four times to check if there is anything else that hasn’t been unified.

IV. About our team

First, I would like to thank everyone in our group, that everyone is supportive from the beginning to the end. Although we changed ideas a lot, no one complain about the wasted work, and always started to work on the next idea energetically. Without encouragement from the group member, I cannot complete such a big and hard project.

Kaitlyn is the person who shared the second most workload. She created the Fu director with the soft effect, and also create all of the audio effects for the Fu director. She worked on the room which is called The Dinner Room, with lots of dishes that can create dialogue that the audience clicks on it. During the working process, we two spend time in 503 and spend nights in the academic building for two nights.

Claire and Charlotte both work on their own rooms separately and hand in the rooms on time, so that I can have time to link them together. Claire works on the room called The Decoration Room, and Charlotte works on the room called The Red Package Room. These two are also filled with the festival atmosphere and fulfilled our project successfully.

The night before the presentation, we four all leave in the 503 to complete the very last work and slept in the academic building together. When morning come and we realize that the class is going to begin, we joked that it is our home and that is going to treat guests, for the scene is really like we made a field trip in 503, with food and changing clothes. No matter how difficult the process is, we complete the hard tasks successfully. Although there is still a lot of space for us to improve, I’m still very proud of what we made as our first unity project. Thank you all and special thanks to Prof. Yunmi! Hope next time I can do better and create a better project.