Final Project
I made a floor plan for the final's installation. I plan to have the participants stand, and to have my laptop on a table connected to the Meta Quest. I also will have a small space heater, which will be hidden under the table and turned on after they put the headset on. I also plan on having the smell of Palo Santo in the room, and a hand fan that I'll have hidden under a cloth.
Week 8
I followed a tutorial to learn how bowling in VR works. I still can't get OBS to work when the Meta Quest is connected.
I also tried out adding the ziplines to my environment, though I haven't gotten it to work just yet.
This is the pitch deck I made for the final project.
Week 6
This week we had to bring our projects into VR. I couldn't get OBS to run while connected to the Quest 3 headset though.
I added more props to the scene, like a hunting rifle, tools, and dishes. I also fixed some issues with the NavMesh seams and added more sci-fi foliage. I also tried to reduce the size of the scene, but turning the graphics settings down to high instead of cinematic helped.
Notes on Playthings
I loved the stylization and saturation of the colors in Playthings, and the rhythm game elements that reminded me of Beat Saber. The food theme played well with the surroundings and feeling of the game. I think the instrumental parts of the game are much better than the parts that have lyrics/vocals, and I think it's fun when games allow you to use their tools to make your own beats.
Notes on Gloomy Eyes
I enjoyed how stylized the models were, and thought it was clever that all the environments were built like dioramas so that the audience can follow the characters as they move from place to place in VR. The film uses the silhouettes of the characters' designs to communicate what archetype they are, and the way body language and lighting is used helps to show the audience how characters feel despite there being no dialogue and little narration.
Week 5
This week I wanted to adapt an excerpt from the science fiction book I’ve been writing. The story is about a boy living in the canyons on his home planet taking care of his baby sister. I've done sketches before of them in the past but wanted to bring them into 3D.
I've adapted the beginning of the story where the boy is in some underwater caves in Unity, but I wanted to adapt the later part of the story where they're in the desert.
I made an environment from the middle section where he’s living in a community with two older women, and it’s sort of a homesteading life. I would like to add more farming and some ziplines.
Week 4
I imported my 1million polygon mesh from NYCAP into Blender, cut the body off and then imported the head into the Unreal mesh to Metahuman. It understood the shape of my face fairly well, it was just confused by my bangs and thought they were a part of my forehead and cheekbone, so I had to smooth out those areas where it protruded out.
I thought the base mesh without skin looked like me even more than when I went into the creator and added details like skin and eye color. While I tried to get as accurate as possible, it's interesting realizing that such small details like variation in skin color and moles can really alter how someone looks. They didn't have hair that looked like mine or options to do the split dye, so I just gave my Metahuman green and pink highlights. I tried to bring it into the scenes from our group project, but there were compatibility issues because the Metahuman we used in our project is from 5.3 so it slightly out of date.
I really liked how the Metahuman turned out, but I wanted to add hair that looked like mine to see if that made her look more similar to me. I looked for free hair on Sketchfab and imported it into Unreal, but since the hair was a static mesh and not grooms it didn't look right, so I tried to learn how to create grooms and followed this tutorial on how to make hair in Blender. I used a mesh from Sketchfab as a base to follow the hairstyle, but when I tried testing importing the groom into Unreal it wasn't working correctly, so I paused learning how to do hair for now.
Notes on Pearl
I really enjoyed the art style of the characters and environments, they felt very expressive. Having the point of view stay in the car was a smart way to have a stationary VR experience, and it also seemed like a good way to recycle assets. The story was very clear even though there was little dialogue, and using the car as the vehicle of the story's progression worked in many ways. The story felt like it could be universal for a lot of people, as many people has some memories of travelling with family somewhere, and the parental conflict was perfect for a short story that needs to be told within five minutes.
Notes on Blindness
I really enjoyed the ambisonic audio and the stylistic visual choices in the film, everything felt tactile and I think the animations were a good visual metaphor. Having these ghostly impressions of people walking around and a fractal look to the environment aided in the presentation of the audio tapes. The panning techniques in Notes on Blindness to create a sense of where things are coming and going was really well done. I used to do sound design for film/animation and podcasts, and took various classes on it, and there's a lot of intention behind what sound effects you're choosing from a library or creating in a foley studio. When you're doing an audio drama where there is nothing to look at, or sound designing for an animation where the environments are impressionistic, sound is so important to create texture of a space. When sound is good you don't notice it, and when sound is bad you really notice it. I also appreciated that they kept the crunchy quality to his recordings instead of trying to clean the recording.
Week 3 - Soundat
We decided to do a horror story since it can be told visually, and audio is very important to the genre. I save free assets every month from Unreal and had a nice cathedral environment that we decided to use. I changed the lighting in the scene and the skybox in order to make it nighttime, and I have a pack of animal assets to add a crow to the scene.
I played around with some cameras in the scene to see what sort of static or establishing shots we could get with just the environment.
I also looked for character models we could use for a protagonist and villain, which we decided would be a nun and a ghost. Since I don't have many characters in the vault, I found some models on Sketchfab, but we didn't use them for this project.
We ended up deciding to use a Metahuman I made in a previous class that has a custom face injury I made in Photoshop. We also decided shift the story so it was about a girl mourning the death of her twin, so we could use the same Metahuman model for the ghostly character and just change the material.
We then split up the work, since there were about 10 sections everyone would do two and some change. I did the first two sections, opening with the girl in the graveyard and then transitioning to the church where she is praying.
Then the sections everyone did were spliced together into one film.
Week 2 - Sight
When we went to get the photogrammetry scans done, I made sure to wear clothes that were patterned and tight, and I asked my roommate to put my hair in a bun since it would've been too long for the scan, and I had wanted to put it in a rope braid since the split in my hair color looks fun when it's braided like that.
The scan turned out really well when it came to my clothes, especially the texture on ym shirt, but the scans were a little confused by my hair. There were lumps on the back of my neck from baby hairs, and my bangs came out very chunky. I had to remove some of the bumps on my neck and fill in the gaps. The scan was also confused by the top inside of my thighs touching, and I tried to correct it but it kept filling the gap incorrectly.
I simplified the model, the hair in the front is especially simplified and I might need to edit it a bit in Blender.
The model animates pretty good, but there is weird stretching between the thighs and in the armpits.
Week 1