building a zen rock garden

On one of the many excursions that we took as international students in Japan, we went to Kyoto. It's a city that's surrounded by many old Buddhist and Shinto temples. The temples are each beautiful and significant in their own way and are themselves surrounded by forests. We happened to go there in the fall, and we were able to see the leaves changing colors. So you can only imagine being among that much beauty.

Anyway, I wanted to create an environment that reminded me of that trip. It's certainly not the first time Kyoto has been referenced in a video game. The whole Zelda franchise was based off of the childhood experience of Shigeru Miyamoto growing up and playing there. I was particularly inspired by the bamboo forests and the Zen rock gardens they have. The Zen rock gardens always impress me. Imagine the person, whoever it was however many years ago, staring at a bunch of gravel and thinking, "Hey, let's use a rake to try to shape this into patterns and at the same time being soothing to make and to watch being made."

The challenge with making a Zen garden in Unity is that I don't know how I would make millions of stones and then rake them into a pattern. Instead, I used a work around by putting series of cylinders and torus (think donut shaped object) with varying gravel textures assigned to them to create the same effect rock garden effect. Then I created pyramid, sphere, and cube stones to put in the middle. This is in reference to the triangle-circle-square that the kanji symbols of aikido (合気道) are supposed to represent. More on the rest of the environment in my next few posts.