Deciding on the setting wasn’t a huge priority of mine. of course, my first thought whereof a Japanese style garden with paper wall buildings (I even went to visit Kyoto gardens to get a feel for the style) but thinking back to my own experience I first was made aware of bonsai at Royal Botanic Garden Edinburgh when I was very young. I find the art deco and nouveau greenhouses visually interesting and in the back of my mind I intend to create a world for VR-Chat at some point and although the Japanese style is very popular with the Anime fan community’s on VR-Chat I feel as if it a style that’s a little played out.
I found this Victorian-style greenhouse under creative commons through the sketchpad blender plugin and used it as a base to create my main botanical space. this model was made to be viewed from the outside and its supports are hollow on the inside so I cut up the model and turned the curve inside out.
used an empty at a 45-degree rotation and used it as a mirror object for the x and y-axis. I then merged them together and created the centre cross and with Ctrl-F created window pains.
I rescaled the Greenhouse in Unity and remade the materials making the glass have additive transparency so the glass wasn’t completely clear but would let light through.
I feel now that spending a day making the greenhouse larger and into the shape of a cross was a waste as all the gameplay elements take place on a desk and the player is gifted far more space than is needed making it feel as if the room feel large and empty. I added cubes as table placeholders. I ended up removing the table in the centre because it felt isolated and lonesome so I moved the XR Rig and toolkit to be on a table away from the centre. I had I little look at the decor that could help fill all the empty space. TLDR: too much space not enough time.