Over the semester, I experimented with imported panoramic drawings.
After a while messing with Unity, I chose to move to the open-source Godot engine .
To do this, I created a hand-drawn cubemap, to use as a skybox. This is like a box template, which folds inwards. As Godot Engine doesn't support cubemaps, a crucial tool was 360 Toolkit , to convert from cubemaps to equirectangular projections.
I wanted to work with my hands to create environments, and I was very inspired by The Last Express . I wanted to make a version of that game with 360° environments, and thought it would be possible to hand-draw them.
With the success of these tests, I drew more elaborate environments. I found tricks for getting the perspective correct: each square's perspective lines run inwards, towards their exact centre. By converting real HDRI environments from HDRI Haven to cubemaps I was able to understand these perspective tricks. In the future with more practice I should be able to create more complex environments.
When it came to recreating the vibe of my grandparents' house, I took out my recorder and got audio of the most important aspects of a summer night in the east of France: the crickets and my family's old Boy Scout songs around a campfire.
I also sat out where we look at the stars and tried to recreate the environment with watercolour paints.
Photos by my brother, Raoul.
I took high resolution scans and cleaned these drawings up. A big problem is maintaining image quality. Because each side of the cube is liable to cover an entire screen top to bottom, each side ought to be of something like 1080x1080 quality. A single image file covering the cube would then be… 3240x4320! Adding to the image quality problem is the image quality loss when editing out the pen marks, resizing the image so it is perfectly 3:4 ratio, etc..
I also edited the sounds from a campfire night using Reaper , into an 8-minute-long audio piece.
I also wanted to make use of my 3D modelling knowledge, and created a telescope in Blender.
