david alexander currie

Cornell Box

December 09, 2020

Animating in Unity

For the final assignment we had to create a Cornell Box in Unity with at least 4 animated parts. As I am completely new to unity I decided to spend most of my time getting a grasp of basic animation techniques in Unity. This was a daunting task but as I worked more on the project I could see the relationships between what we did in After Effects the for the previous assignment.

I imported some basic assets from the asset store and then proceeded to animate them within the box. This took a considerable amount of time due to my unfamiliarity with unity. Even basic things like moving the view & playing my objects in the right place took some time to figure out.

In an attempt to make my scene more interesting I attached spotlights to the diamonds. I figured out that you could create interesting effects by nesting the lights inside the game objects of the diamonds. This meant that they adopted the animations of the diamonds.

It was only near the end of working on this project that I realised that I could literally animate any property in Unity. I played around with animating the color of the box & the color and intensity of the lights. In the video above, I added a zoom out to show the box from a distance at the end of the video.

This was a fun project, and I am excited to work on Unity more over the break. I have a background in sound and coding and so I spent some time looking into how to create sounds in Unity with [Chunity] but didn’t have time to do this for this project. (http://chuck.stanford.edu/chunity/)


Written by David Currie, a current student at NYU ITP. Follow me on Twitter