VietPark – Part 2: The Mockup
Now that I have the basic idea together (see Part 1: The Idea), its a good idea to do a few mockup images or sketches to begin formalising the layout of VietPark.
Rather than jumping into photoshop at this stage, I’ve decided to go oldskool and do a few sketches. Because my original idea is fairly basic, I can probably get away with only doing a sketch of the top and an isometric view that covers 2 of the 4 walls.
Top Down
Isometric
From the sketches you can probably work out that I’m going to need about 6 unique entities (an entity in VastPark is what 3D assets become once they are imported into the system):
- 1 room that is sort of squarish and consists of 4 walls and maybe a roof
- 1 flag (maybe animated)
- 1 table
- 1 animated notepad with pen
- 1 animated movie clapper board
- 1 heightmap of Vietnam
You may be wondering why I haven’t included any assets on the list for the pictures and messages that are going to appear in the site. Luckily, VastPark has built in scripting commands that can generate a number of primitive objects on the fly, including:
GenerateBoxEntity GenerateConeEntity GenerateCylinderEntity GenerateSphereEntity
In this case, im going to use
GenerateBoxEntityto create polaroid looking assets for the images and sticky notes for the messages, all of which will happen on the fly as the result of an event trigger.
Part 3 will go into further detail on the design aspects, including some actual code samples and test implementations.
VietPark – Part 1: The Idea
My special lady and I are headed to Vietnam for a 2 week holiday next month and instead of setting up a photo page, I have decided that this is a perfect opportunity to create a VastPark site to share with my family and friends (and anyone else who wants to take a peek). I’ve decided to name this site VietPark.
The basic idea of this site is to create a single room with a table in the middle of it. On top of that table I want to put a smallish 3D model of Vietnam with a series of flags that act as the navigation system for the site. Each of these flags will correspond to a place of interest that we photographed along the way. Users will be able to click on the flags and have the images appear on 3 of the 4 walls around the table. The fourth wall will be used as a message board for visitors to leave me a message.
Stay tuned for some sketches of VietPark in my next post 
Welcome!
For those who haven’t yet heard of VastPark, its an interactive media platform that allows you to create and share your very own 3D website (think of it as a cross between MySpace and YouTube in 3D). Currently it consists of a WYSIWYG editor similar to Dreamweaver to create and publish 3D sites and a browser application used to browse the sites.
I intend to use this blog to detail my personal VastPark site(s), including tips on howÂ
I have made them from the design process all the way through to getting the site live.