Zoe - Prepare your scene

Overview - Exploring the Solar System

Setting up assets in your scene

Adding Interactivity

Light and Materials

Although this project is for an intermediate level it has been designed to be followed by students that don't have much experience of Unity nor Zoe. The goal is to teach about the solar system and user experience design with Unity and Zoe.

We recommend to create groups of students that will be accessing turn by turn the interface of Unity. 

The project has separate research and implementation phases and is scheduled for multiple sessions.

Zoe_SolarSystemExploration.zip

In this tutorial we are going to reproduce the Solar System, allow the user to navigate in between planets and learn interesting facts about them. 

You are in the middle of space, very close to the sun and to what seems a very small planet. When you look at it an information tells you that you are actually facing Mercury, the smallest planet of the solar system. Then instructions start appearing next to your controllers: you can move in space as if you were flying using your joystick. Then you are given the power to trig Mercury’s revolution around the sun by pointing at it. Finally you can be ported to the next planet by pressing a button. You will see interesting facts while you are travelling in space, notice how fast the planets are actually rotating compared to one another and you will realise that some of the distances are really long! 

Building a Solar System Exploration with Zoe

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Make the sun emit light

Create a space environment

Additional effects

You are almost done, as behaviours are set now we are just going to add visual effects and make everything look like we are in space.

In space the light is actually coming from the sun. First delete the Directional Light that is by default inside your scene. Now let’s create the light coming from the sun. Right-click in the Hierarchy and select Light > Point Light. 

Point lights have a sphere shape and emit light in all directions just like the sun. Place it at 0, 0, 0 like the sun then make it light up to Neptune by changing its Range inside the Inspector to 5500. You can also change the color and the intensity if you want. Keep the mode to “Realtime” because our planets will be moving and reacting to the light in realtime.

The sun light can be seen on the other planets but it may not seem that the sun is actually emitting light. For this we are going to change its material to one that emits light. Look for the ‘Sun’ provided with the tutorial. Select the sun and in the inspector change its Material by this one: 

If you check the settings of the Material (by selecting the Material inside the Project window), the property ‘Emissive’ is what makes it look like emitting light:

Finally go to Prefabs and drag the SunSurface one inside the 'Visuals' on the sun. This prefab is a Particle System already set for simulating the activity on the sun's surface:

Press play and see how particles start to appear on the surface of the sun.

Point Light parameters

Assigning the Sun material

Sun Surface particle system

First let’s make the environment dark. Go to Window > Rendering > Lighting Settings. 

Here you can change the Skybox Material. The Skybox is like a box around your scene, drawing the sky and the ground. Change the material by the one provided with the tutorial, called “SpaceSkybox”. 

The background of your scene should be completely dark, if you Play and test inside your headset you will see a subtle gradient around the horizon.

If you go to the settings of the material you will see that it is a Skybox/Procedural type of material, you can play around with the parameters and see how it changes the whole scene.

Now let's add some starts. Go to SolarSystem > Prefabs and drag the Stars into your hierarchy. This is a particle system from Unity, set to simulate stars inside your scene. If you select it in the Hierarchy they start the simulation:

Skybox

We also provide some sound effects for the Project that you can use to indicate to the user when a planet started its revolution and when he/she is being ported to the next planet. Sound is very important to achieve a good immersive experience!

You can check the SolarSystemFull scene to see how sound has been implemented:

And now that you know how to create interactivity you can test and adjust until you are happy with your experience. 

Light and Materials

1. Make the sun emit light

2. Create a space environment

3. Additional effects

Complete this tutorial