This project, entitled Volans Gaia, features an airship pirate captain atop his craft. I’ve dubbed the captain Mimameid Laerath, and his ship is the eponymous Volans Gaia. The idea was to create an airship and captain who are overgrown with plants. In place of a mast, the Volans Gaia has a massive tree. It’s also overgrown with ivy. Captain Laerath himself also has viny growths on his body, and parts of him are covered in bark as well. Simultaneously, since it’s an airship, I wanted to get across the feeling of soaring through the air. The rushing clouds, whistling wind, beating wings, and off-kilter camera angle all serve that purpose. The wind in particular I had to get creative to loop properly- after getting the audio I wanted, I duplicated and reversed it so that it played forwards, then backwards, then repeated, ensuring that it would flow smoothly as the wind continues to howl in the players’ ears.

Here is a brief showcase of the level:

At every turn I found myself wrestling with the technology. I am primarily a 2D artist, so 3D was relatively uncharted territory for me. At every turn, once I had a grasp on modeling, then texturing kicked my ass. Then, once I had that down, rigging and animating kicked my ass. However, consequently I learned a lot about 3D workflow and how it differs from 2D. I’m sure it would go much smoother if I had to repeat the process. I also learned a lot about Unity and how to properly get things to run, even in a simple art demo like this- I find that computers hate me, so I usually leave the technical side to people on friendlier terms with the machines. Now, however, I have significantly more confidence in my ability to get Unity to function the way I want it to.

The sounds of the wings and the wind were originally taken from Zapsplat.com, but the wind was slightly modified. The animations were the Unity defaults, as were the footstep sounds.

Here is a link to the ZIP folder: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1ZKvMqrj-tbN0FnYQct6r0I_dZpR8an92/view?usp=sharing

Full disclosure that’s just a ZIP of the folder I was using to store all of my files for this class. Probably not everything in there is necessary but it’s 7:15, I haven’t slept, and computers hate me so I’m not gonna sort through it and make it as small as possible. I also couldn’t create a Mac build.