For One Last Time

During two of the weeks of tutorials classes, our team met with two past animation course students who also focused and found themselves involved in the world of VR and immersive technologies.  Daryl Randall and Aidan Scott both previously worked on a project focusing on the topic of post traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) of soldiers after returning home from the frontline of war.  ' Zemblanity ' i s also a passive user experience to play with the mind and emotions of the user and give them certain emotions and feelings of discomfort.  It was beyond helpful to hear from both of them and to receive advice on the best route and steps to enhance our project and keep it on track to succeed and be a hit.  Below are some screenshots from their VR project from 2017. You can see their final video release here -  https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=287&v=SpXthAHG-eY Daryl Although Daryl was amazingly helpful to us as a team, most of his advice an

As we begin blocking out animation and key poses, the following are the scene parts that I will be taking on over the next few weeks to create - AI speaks to YOU GIRL begins to fuss AI speaks to GIRL, hands over drawing paper AI walks away, cleaning tables GIRL draws GIRL speaks to you GIRL throws drawing on ground, is bored, stands up AI goes to get coffee, walks over to the MAN, pours it AI spills on MAN, first glitch MAN freaks, jumping out of chair GIRL laughs AI reassures MAN sits back down GIRL picks up drawing As an inexperienced animator, and as a person who likes to see things come together fast rather that see them in stages.  I struggled with the aspect of blocking animation.  I knew it needed to be done but was frustrated with the time needed to do simply, what I could just do in flu

As key posing and refining animation have begun and have progressed, myself, Lorna and Megan who are animating our narrative, decided we needed to gather a larger collection of research.  For this research, we wanted to gain both primary and secondary assets that could be used to assist us in giving our characters life, personality and attitude.  We knew that the best way to do this, yes, is the way the voices are recorded and spoken, but from an animation perspective, it all comes down to body language and emotional expressions. With this in mind, we set out to gather our own, and trusted research material that could be used as reference for us as we develop our animations.  Firstly, we captured images of our own faces portraying various emotions as we see them.  Secondly we were fortunate enough to receive a book full of expressions and references from our tutor Henry, and this was so valuable to us and we took many photos of the emotions and shared them on our team Onedrive so

In order to optimise and improve the quality of our project, it was essential that I went back into our Substance Painter files and our asset model file in Maya, and ultimately optimised them. Until this point, we hadn't moved our assets UVs into one map, and instead, were using multiple maps.  DISASTER. ANYWAY, we are fixing it.  Moving all UVs of each model into one map means that when applying textured and exporting them to input into Unity, there will be much less clutter and texture overlap. At this stage, this will help in a huge way for us as currently, the way we exported and imported, we had thousands...and thousands....AND THOUSANDS of textures in the unity scene.  Each asset could have had as much as 40 textures on it.  UNBELIEVABLE AND IN NEED OF FIXING. So here we are, going in, moving all UVs (after being correctly unfolded and laid out in Maya) and exporting them into Substance.  From here, it's about reapplying the textures from before and developi

During our tutorial session with Henry this week, we were able to receive more advice and guidance for our project.  Henry allowed us to begin thinking of certain aspects of our project in a new light, predominantly, the areas of animation and research.  In this blog post, I will go through the points and advice he raised with us and how this will impact us as a team moving forward. "Look at flight attendances and how they explain safety procedure" Henry suggested to us that if our waitress begins the narrative explaining and showing us the Pit Stop, it would be best if we looked at individuals who do that quite calm and almost robotic like.  He gave the example of a flight attendant who is explaining the safety features of an airplane before take off.  This was especially helpful for me as I have the first section of animation to complete and this example and research with benefit me as I seek to achieve a realistic and high quality appeal for our AI waitress.

As our project becomes more hands on and all on deck, we have the opportunity each week to meet with a member of the tutor team here within the Animation course. This week our team was meeting individually with Brian, a tutor who has an impressive and successful background in the gaming industry. With this knowledge Brian has he knows the Unity interface and was able to offer us some advice and suggest helpful elements that we could implement into our scene and narrative to really make our project stand out. Optimisation was was a key point of conversation as I spoke to Brian about the scene and the amount of geometry we have within the scene at this time. Moving forward, we will need to work as a team to ensure that each part of the scene is a inexpensive on playback time as possible. Brian recommended using the Unity site to resear ch vario us tips and advice for optimising our scene as best as possible. He told me to look at the page “optimisation for VR in unity” The