Why I do not want to help students anymore

Every semester I try my level best to help my students. I was a student before and I always wanted to do well and when I see them looking for help I remember my student time and I help. A lot of times I may not be able to help as much as I wished, but I try.

I do not expect any thank you note for that, but what I got today's mail was a wake up call for me. Here is the mail [minus the names]

=============================================================
From: student 1 <xxxx@yahoo.com>
Date: Fri, Apr 30, 2010 at 2:22 AM
Subject: Urgent.Emergency(unity);
To: avijit.paul@mmu.edu.my

Dear my beloved Sir, We’re having problems with our unity. The submission is due on next Monday. We’re running out of time. We don’t want to fail this course. Please, please, please help us.  We are so desperate. This is not fair, we have tried our best. We give all our heart and soul to this project. Everyone else got interaction. But we don’t even know how to publish our work. Which selection to choose, ya? Is it the OSX standalone? What is OSX? With this email we attach our unity file. Please do the third person controller with hovering, floating effect. Then the user can boost the speed of the character after collecting stuff. Please do all nicely. We don’t have enough time to do this assignment because we want to watch anime and play games. Please ya! You are my only hope. Then put extra FX to make our environment fantastic and beautiful for bonus marks. I really really need this. We know nothing about unity, so please do everything for us, ya! You are the nicest lecturer we know. After you finish, please burn in CD and design the cover for us. Remember to use the thin jewel case. Please remember ya, this is very important! We don’t want to fail this course. We don’t want to waste our parents’ money. Finally, submit the CD to [lecturer 1] on Monday between 2-4pm. Please don’t be late. We can’t go submit on Monday because we will be at Singapore “jalan-jalan cari makan”(please google this) I really really hope you’ll understand our situation. Please don’t tell Mr. Mazlan that you do all our Unity stuff. Keep it secret, till death do us part. Please please, we don’t want to fail this course. That’s all for this sem. We’ll be back to ask you to do our assign for FYP. PS:  Oh btw, how to export Max to Unity? Sincerely, Student 1 and student 2 PSS: Please take this with a bit of sarcasm. Don’t take this seriously. This is the joke of the semester! =======================================================  I replied =======================================================  Thanks for writing this mail, although both of you probably have crossed the line by miles, but it was a good realization mail.  Even though it makes me sad to read this email as I really believed [student 3] needed help on the unity part so I tried to help as much as I could even though I did not get to help much. But after your reading your email I understand my mistake. I was trying too hard to help and most probably I am not going to help anyone ever and will show the email [minus the names] as a reference why I dont want to help.  =======================================================  Anyone who is reading it might think why cant I just take a sarcastic email? After all it is a joke and they have exaggerated a bit too much and it is probably a good fun. The problem is that,  recently I took a lot of criticism from a number of faculty members for helping too much. I digested all of it thinking I am trying to do a greater good as the students probably really need help.  It takes a lot of my time and effort to find ways to solve problems. I spend a good number of hours trying to solve this technical issues that I could have used for my own work. I still did because I believed it will help.  But after this, please dont bother asking for help.  The door has been shut, at least for the rest of my time in MMU.

Underwater effects like island demo in unity3d

A lot of times I get asked how to do the underwater effects like the one we see in island demo - where when you / your camera goes under water level you see blurry atmosphere.

Since most of the questions are asked by Non Programmers, (ex http://forum.unity3d.com/viewtopic.php?p=195450 )  here is a "copy paste" style tutorial that you should be able to follow to create your underwater effects.


Level : Beginner heading towards intermediate 


Things you need
1. Underwater script (comes with island demo)
2. Underwater shader (comes with island demo)
3. Blur island script (comes with island demo)
4. Glow Effect Island script (comes with island demo)

Lets get our hands dirty
0. Open your island demo project, create a new scene.
1. Create a terrain.
2. Drag daylight water in the scene.
3. Enlarge it to make it fill your scene / area that you are trying to put water on.
4. Drag first person controller to the scene. Position it where you need it to start walking
5. Click Main camera so that you can now assign scripts to the main camera
6. Go to components > Scripts > Underwater script to add underwater script to the camera.

7. Now you should have underwater effect script on your main camera. However, if you try to go under the water right now, you wont see any effect. For that, you need to add the under water surface first.
8. Go to Game object > Create other > Plane
9. Make the plane to have EXACTLY same X, Y, Z as the daylight water. (You can make the Y of the underwater a little low - just like what I did, but X and Z should be same)

10. Now drag the underwater shader from the water folder from the project window.

11. You can try to play and go underwater now and VOLA!!! You are stuck!! You wanted to see blur and now You cant even get down. That is because your plane has a collider. So remove the collider from the plane and you are good to go down.

12. However, you still cant see any blurriness. That is because your camera dont have any blur script to it. So, select the "main camera" under first person controller prefab and go to
a) Component > Image effect > blur (island)
b) Component > Image effect > Glow (Island)

13. One you assigned all of this, the last thing you need to assign in an audio source. That is because the default script that comes with island demo has audio and your current camera dont have audio. So click the main camera again, and go to
Component > Audio > Audio source

14. Now play it, you should have similar blurry effect.

15. If you want to control the blur, change the iteration or blur speed under blur effect island. (this is under main camera) . Here I changed the iterations from 3 to 1 to have clearer effect.

So hope you can follow this and create your own underwater effects. If you are doing it in a different folder you need to copy the relevant scripts there, but I assume if you can follow this you already know how to copy the scripts needed to your folder.

Drop me a line at avijit.paul   at   mmu.edu.my or avijit.paul.1992     at   gmail.com   or post a comment below if you have any questions.