In this AR project, I tried to create an artificial planet that people live on after we run out of all the natural resources on earth. This imaginary planet was built to be surrounded by the earth. Therefore, you will be able to see the earth orbiting us. However, the artificial planet itself is not a utopian solution. As you move around in the environment, you will see that all the human constructions like buildings and televisions are swallowed by the ocean, with only a few trees being left out. It represented that even when we find a new world that might replace the planet we had before if we do not invest our minds into preserving them, the ending will always be the same.

When I was making the project, I met several challenges. The first challenge was that it took me a lot of time to export prefabs from Unity to Styly. Styly only accepts a specific version of Unity, so I have to download an archive version of Unity to do anything with it. Also, for some reason, when I tried to open my scene with Styly mobile application, the objects I created kind of merged with the environment. Therefore, some of the objects that I put into the environment were gone when I actually opened it on the mobile end. I am really looking forward to knowing how to solve this problem during class time.

Testing-1

The work I want to use as the prototype plot of my scene is the movie “Real Steel”. In this movie, boxing is no longer fought by humans, but they have been replaced by robots. the once great prizefighter lost his chance to win the championship with his robotic boxer when a towering robot took over the boxing ring. After the defeat, he could barely make enough money for his own bears and had to make living by selling scrap-made robots. However, just before the main character completely gave us his robotic boxing career, he got some special help from his son. they started doing robotic boxing again as a team, which helped them form a more stable bond and finally won all the prizes.

In the movie, there are three scenes that play important roles in the movie. The first scene is at the beginning of the story. The robot owned by the main character, “ATOM”, was fighting in a local arena with another robot. This is the first boxing game of the main character’s son so their robot was very close to losing the game as he was not very familiar with how to control the robot. However, just when everyone thinks ATOM is gonna lose, the father taught the son some very important knowledge about how to maneuver the robot, and they won their first game together.

The second important scene is when the family went inside the town to prepare for the competition. While most people treat robots as machines that are doing their job by fighting. The son treats ATOM as a part of the family and dances with him just like dancing with a good friend. During the process, the son builds his interpersonal connections with his robot.

The family finally got the chance to challenge the old enemy again, but the enemy robot was obviously more powerful and more advanced. Just like the first game, ATOM looked very weak against its enemy at the beginning of the match, but the father suddenly recalled the dance move his son used to play with the robot, and decided to use those dance moves to cleverly dodge the powerful attack from the enemy and finally won the battle.

In the first week of my work, I used the cartoon model of a cat to express my imagination of what our city would look like if cats were 20 times bigger than they actually are today. In my storyboard this time, I decided to work on an interesting observation I had on campus. In many buildings on campus, there are signs in front of the gates saying that we should never let cats go inside the building. Therefore, in this story, the cat sneaks into the building and locks the door so that no one can go inside. Besides that, it also put a sign in front of the building saying that “humans cannot enter the building without permission”.

To create this dramatic scene, I used Scenario Application to take the AR picture of the cat sleeping on a table in front of the C2 building. After that, I took a picture of the hallway of my dormitory with google street view. This procedure is quite challenging for me as the hallway of my dorm building is very narrow, so it was very difficult to make the panorama picture intact. After that, I combined the two scenes and inserted the first-person controller so that viewers can move around and see the cat and the environment freely. I even added a physical collider to the cat so that the person can climb on top of the cat!

Pokemon has been a very important part of many people’s childhood memories. Without exception, it was also one of the most memorable games I’ve ever played in my life. Therefore, when the most recent version of the game, POKÉMON LEGENDS: ARCEUS, was released, it didn’t take me too long to make the decision of playing it. Instead of making the game 2D like how it has been for a long time, the pokemon game this time is in 3D with all the animations and environments becoming more realistic.

The materials that are used to comprise most of the elements in the game are very resembling the low poly elements I was using when I was creating my first project. However, what is particularly engrossing about the environment is that it inherited the styles of buildings and constructions from the time when the game was first invented. Therefore, it has a lot of natural scenes with textures of buildings in the villages mostly bricks and rocks. In these two things, several elements of the building are emphasized, they are terrains of mountains, grass, trees, and different buildings in the village. The external environment of nature is mostly open, with no clear pathways. Therefore, players are able to explore the grassland freely and meet different Pokemons. But when it comes to the inside of buildings, they are enclosed areas with different interior decorations, but a lot of those buildings have similar design patterns. For example, in the same village, there might be houses of residences that have different sizes and theme colors, but the types of furniture they have and the general structures of their houses are very similar.

Walking around the campus of NYU Abu Dhabi, you can see cats everywhere on campus. Being a fervent cat lover and also the owner of three cats, I am always wondering how our relationships will change with them if they are existing in a different form. Inspired by Indonesian artist Fransdita Muafidin, I started to imagine what if cats are 50 times bigger than their current sizes. What will it be like to have a ‘street’ cat actually walking on the Street?

In this Project, I used several different assets to build a small city by the mountain. I also found an asset that has the model of an orange cat, so I enlarged it 50 times and put it in the middle of the fictional road I built. After that, I put a car in front of the cat and tried to take a U-turn to avoid bumping into this gigantic animal. It is very exciting to see that I constructed the city exactly as I thought it was going to look.

There are many things that are very challenging to a complete beginner like me. During the process of designing, I had a hard time changing the texture of the terrain, as I do not know how to design it to make it look more realistic. After several failed attempts, I finally decided to use plain green as the base colour of my terrain, which might make it less realistic. At the same time, it was very challenging to find the right assets that match each other well. I found a lot of good assets in the store but a lot of them have different styles, so I ended up using the assets from the different works of the same artist. Because of that, I am wondering if there are anyways I can find assets that fit with each other in a more efficient way.

In the classes, I really want to learn how to make animations and build the terrain to make it more pragmatic. By learning those things, I can make the scenario more vivid and realistic.