Tutorial:Virtual Worlds Made Easy Create your first Virtual World
Time to complete: 5 minutes approximately
Summary: This tutorial will guide you through the essentials to creating your first virtual world.
Aim: Learn to add in a light, skybox, terrain, and a building.
Required application: VastPark Creator

Create your first Virtual World

Okay so you have downloaded our creator tool and you want to build your own virtual world. Only problem is you don't have the first idea on where to start.

Open up the VastPark Creator and choose to start with a New park.

You will see an empty canvas. If you don't see a wireframe grid, hit the F1 key on your keyboard. This toggles the grid.

After a few seconds you will see a list of recently added entries appear in the Library (left hand column). If you don't, then either you're not connected to the Internet, your firewall is blocking the Creator from accessing the Internet (inwhich case you must alter your firewall's settings) or the VastPark Web Service is temporarily down. I'm going to presume that you're seeing a list of items in the Library so we can proceed.

Video version of the tutorial

The first thing I do in any park is add in a light, so to insert a light you go up to the insert menu and click on the light, this will add a light directly in front of you.

It's always a good thing to change the properties of your light and this can be done by hitting the properties tab in the explorer window on the right of screen. In the Appearance menu change the light type to directional, and then change its position in the transform menu to 0,-1, 0. Have a play around with the values to become familiar with the properties menu, but you won't notice any real changes until you add in some content.

So let's change that by adding in a terrain. The Library is a list of all of the available items that can be downloaded for your park and it is located on the left of screen. The best way to look for something is by using the search bar. Type in terrain and you will get a list of the available terrains, I used the mountain terrain. The model may not appear instantly as it has to download, you can see the progress of the download in the project tab of the explorer.

Once it appears you can transform it with either the position tool, rotate tool, or uniform-size tool, by left clicking on the object and moving the mouse in a direction. It is also possible to use these tools on a specific axis by holding the mouse button down over the tool buttons and selecting the axis you want the transform to occur on.

We have our light and terrain so now I'm going to add in a church; again I did a search in the library for church. Using *.* in the search will list every item available, so have a look and see what you can find.
I positioned the church on top of the mountain with the position tool, but without a sky it looked a bit dull so let's change that by getting a skybox from the library,

Again I used a *.* search in the library but I used the filter dropdown to do a search just for skybox's. I selected the White Clouds Sky.

To apply it select MyPark in the project list and go to the properties tab. In Appearance there is a sky drop down, it will list any downloaded skybox's. Select the White Clouds sky and it will appear automatically appear in the scene.

The only thing that's missing is a shadow from the church, so go ahead and click on the church and in the appearance menu check the "Cast Shadows" box. At first you may not notice much of a difference, that's because the light is casting straight down. To change this select the light and move it with either the position tool, or typing in values in the transform menu of the properties tab.

And there you have it, your first virtual world! Keep an eye out for more of our Virtual Worlds Made Easy Tutorials.