Fairfield Deluxe Home & Region

February 11, 2019 / 12 Comments

Introducing the Fairfield deluxe home & region, a template you can use for your personal space in SineSpace!

I worked on this project for quite some time. I wanted to make something people could customize as much as possible. Plus I wanted to take advantage of some of the really cool technology in Unity and SineSpace.

Of course, the house makes use of the floorplan system. You get a ‘Room Editor’ button and the ability to place your furniture and decorations on most floors and walls and even in the yard really easily (like my art posters, solar panels, or holiday tree for example). Your items should just snap to the surface, but you can also fine-tune the placement (check out this post for a furniture tutorial). If the item’s creator allows it, you can also easily resize furniture and decor. The Room Editor allows you to do so much more… Click here to check out a tutorial on how to create regions and use a region template.

So Much to Customize

First and foremost, there are 16 different configurable zones in this region. In almost every room you have options to customize and swap materials. You can change the floors, walls, base molding (at the bottom), and crown molding (at the top). Like any real-world home it has tan carpets and white walls (with tiled kitchen floor and wood dining room flooring). You can easily swap those out using any materials that you own (either from one of my packs or something made by someone else). Check out this post for a demo and tutorial on swapping materials.

Adjustable Lights Included

Each room either has a simple ceiling light light like what’s pictured above, or a hanging light. There are also fluorescent lights in the garage and attic. In the room editor you can turn lights on/off and adjust the brightness, and even choose the color of the light. All the lights start with natural colors, but can easily be changed. Check out this post for a demo and tutorial on adjusting lights and materials.

Selectable Day & Night

In the main zone (which is labeled Start Here!) there are configurable buttons for day and night. The region defaults to daytime, but with a click you can choose to make it sunrise, sunset, or middle-of-the-night. You can also choose to have a full day/night cycle, where the sun rises and sets (and stars come out at night). You can choose to set your SineSpace day to 3, 6, 12, or 24 hours – and once you saved settings are remembered between visits. Check out this post to see how the selectable day and night settings work, it was recorded in the Fairfiend Deluxe home and region. For a tutorial on adjusting the daytime lighting settings, click here.

Yes, the home and entire region fully uses physically based rendering (or PBR) materials. These advanced materials look amazing in different lighting settings and visually sets SineSpace apart from previous generation worlds.

I also designed it in such a way that as you go through the house, the camera comes in closer. This should reduce (or hopefully eliminate) situations where the camera pokes through the wall or you and your guests have a hard time seeing.

Clickable Doors

The house also features clickable doors! Exterior doors are in the center of the picture above, and feature one larger and one smaller – click on either and they will both animate open if closed, and closed if open. Interior doors are all like the one on the left in the picture. Check this post or see the video below to see it in action.

In designing the house I knew I wanted people to be able to ‘park’ and show off their vehicles. Howeer, I struggled with how to handle the garage. Rather than having the garage be always open or closed, or use a really basic animation to open the door, I dove into Unity’s animation capabilities. The result is an electric automatic garage door that slowly opens and closes as each segment moves along the track.

Space To Explore

Of course, what good is a garage and driveway if you don’t have anywhere else to drive? The rural countryside region is big… more than 3.5 square kilometers of space (more than 4x the size of a region in a popular previous generation virtual world). Gentle, rolling grass-covered hills, with a few kilometers of driveable roads. The Fairfield deluxe home and region gives you plenty of room to explore. Go for walks, runs, or practice driving your favorite vehicle.

The countryside is covered in beautiful sycamore trees, a custom design I created and with leaves and branches that move in the wind. There are deer and rabbits roaming the woods, and sparrows flying in the skies above. The skies also feature volumetric clouds – a technology I spent way too much time learning for another project (hahaha), but deliver really amazing cloud cover.

Throughout the entire project, I did my best to keep an eye on efficiency. The intent was to give you a place that looked great and felt luxurious, and gave you lots of options to customize as much as possible, but left you with plenty of room to decorate. It currently comes in at only 55MB, leaving you 73MB for your furniture and decor on a free plan, and GIGANTIC OODLES OF SPACE on one of the paid subscriptions.