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Tutorial:Virtual Worlds Made Easy Build Your Own Maze
Time to complete: 10 minutes approximately
Summary: In this tutorial we will introduce you to the Primitives system to create a maze.
Aim: Learn to insert primitives and change their materials.
Required application: VastPark Creator

The first thing we are going to do is add a directional light to the Park and position it at 0, -1, 0. I'm going to use the default light properties, feel free to make changes to the properties but you wont notice any changes until there is content in the Park.

We are going to start our maze by putting in the ground. Under the insert menu there are a group of buttons called Primitives, there are 4 basic shapes and they are great for laying out Parks and saving on download time. For this tutorial we're going to use boxes so click on Box and that will insert a box in front of you.

We're going to change its size by clicking the lock button next to size in the transform menu of the properties tab. That will allow us to make changes to one axis of the box without affecting the others. Change the size to something like 200, 1, 200 and position it a 0, -1, 0.

To distinguish our ground from the rest of the maze it might help if we change its colour. In the appearances menu of the properties tab change the ambient and the diffuse values. Play around with the colours until you find something you like. We also want to be able to walk on our ground so under behaviour make physics 'Enabled' by ticking the box. Be sure to leave 'moveable' unchecked as your floor will fall away from you when in interactive preview.

Now we have our ground let's start building the walls of the maze. To make life simpler we are going to change some grid settings, to do this go to the home menu has and click on the button called configure. This will bring up the options menu and by clicking on the Interaction tab we can set our grid spacing to 0.5 and enable snap to grid.

Make a new box, again making physics 'Enabled', change its size to something like 0.5, 3, 5 and place it at 0, 0, 0. Insert another new box, its size should be 5, 3, 0.5. Drag the walls together using the position tool to make a corner. To make more wall sections you can either insert more boxes and change their properties, or you can duplicate selected objects by holding the control key and dragging with the position tool. Continue in this fashion, changing the size and position of boxes where needed, until you have the shape of the maze you are after.

Hopefully you should get something that resembles a maze and are now comfortable using the Primitives system. Later on we will look at adding in start and end points and introduce controllers so we can navigate through the maze.


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