Weekly Workshop

Week 1

Screen Recording 2022-09-04 at 9.23.51 PM.mov


Hello!

Welcome to the artificial garage shelves hanging on the wall, table and suitcase in the corner, a longboard waiting for its owner, a small stool on the ground, a locker in the cupboard, and a slice of cheese on the table!

The view focuses on a corner of the garage perfectly showing the perspective of the layout.

I explored the Unity Learn and Unity Asset Store and found a lot of interesting and powerful materials which can be used for my own design. In Unity Learn, a guideline for building an art gallery caught my eye. It is the basis of modeling space when simulating buildings in real life. In Unity Asset Store, I found some dedicated models of certain cute foods and a simple garage model with plenty of materials, models, prefabs, and scenes.

Screen Recording 2022-09-04 at 9.15.16 PM.mov
Screen Shot 2022-09-04 at 9.48.37 PM.png

I am quite confused about the layers in Unity. As you can see in the left screenshot and video, the locker is above the small stool, and the small stool is above the cheese. However, in the left column in Hierarchy, the sequence is the small stool, locker, and cheese. And they are all on layer 0 (default). So, I am wondering what decides the layers of those objects.

With practice and experience, I am now familiar with the Assets and basic shortcuts of Unity.

In this project, the objects I added are all separated from the background scene, but in reality, objects are often attached to the background and won't move with the movement of the view. Sometimes they are put on the ground or hung on the wall, but I found it difficult to put these objects at the exact angle and position to make them more realistic. So in future studies, I will explore more about how to make better 3D models for them.

Hi Wendy, you can read about sorting layer here in this tutorial: please let me know if you have any questions.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZzcyREamMUo

Week 2

The Sound of Music

The film is about a young Austrian postulant who is sent to the villa of a retired naval officer and widower to be a governess to his seven children. After bringing love and music into the lives of the family, she marries the officer and, together with the children, finds a way to survive the loss of their homeland to the Nazis.

The scene where Maria takes the children to sing on the hillside is one of the most important scenes in the whole film. On the hillside, Maria took the guitar and used music to heal the children. They put aside the constraints of life and returned to the purest beauty of life. In this scene, there are blue sky and white clouds, snow-capped mountains in the distance, and the lawn below. Guitars and picnic baskets are also important props.

The second scene shows the villa of retired naval officer Captain Georg von Trapp and his seven children. This is where the protagonists of the movie live. It is also where they gradually eliminate estrangement, trust each other, and harvest happiness. Beyond the fence of the villa is a vast landscape of green mountains and green waters, which has a symbolic meaning in the movie, symbolizing the freedom outside the villa. Behind them is a tall white villa, with flowers and grasses surrounding it.

Week 3

Storyboard

I was inspired by the video Environmental Storytelling - Scout Expedition Co. - Immersive Design Summit (2018), so I decided to create environmental storytelling in my project. I put four objects in the scene and hope the viewers can find the causal relations between them with the background suggesting the aesthetic atmosphere.

2022-09-19-22-11-04.mp4

The 360 picture serving as the skybox was taken by me in the Art Center (C3) using Google Street View. I found two obstacles when shooting 360 pictures: the first one is that the 360 panorama is composed of many pictures, and the stitching is prone to misalignment and overlap, making the picture strange. At the same time, in order to avoid the first problem, I need to keep the position still, when shooting the ground picture, my feet will enter the lens, making the picture unclean.

360 picture and video as a skybox gives me an immersive experience, which is very important for VR. But I am still not very proficient in inserting video as a skybox. I need to watch the steps step by step, and I don't know how to make a 360 video by myself. Shooting objects with the Scenario app also often fails to generate 3d models. Another technical issue is finding and importing the right unity assets, which tend to take me a long time.

Week 4

Oculus Quest 2

In my opinion, Paper Birds is an audio-visual feast that combines animation, shows, movies, musicals, and other art forms. Paper Birds created an immersive story world for me. The whole story is developed by a little boy "I" as the first perspective, which increases the audience's sense of substitution and the authenticity of the story. The stories of my sister, my grandfather, and my grandmother are all drawn by "I", which are logically coherent and easy to understand.

What I see in front of me is not always a 360 panorama, but sometimes a storyline that gradually unfolds, allowing me to quickly understand the storyline and allow me to explore on my own. I can see through the protagonist's window, follow the protagonist on the bridge he crosses, and so on. In addition, lighting and sound effects also play an important role. Lights let the player look in a certain direction. Music can not only set off the environment in which the story takes place, but also make players more immersive. For example, once the doorbell rang from behind me, I instinctively turned my head and saw someone standing outside the door, which made me feel very immersed.

Among them, my favorite is the interactive part. With my movements, my hands also glowed blue. There is no need for any extra cues, just show the hand on the screen, and the player will naturally raise his hand and start interacting. Especially the climax part and the passionate music make me more aware of the preciousness of inspiration and the meaning of paper birds.


For National Geographic Explore VR, I chose the Antarctic as my destination. I found the journey extremely interesting with real-life interaction and beautiful scenes as if I was an Antarctic explorer. Where would I go, what would I do, I What I will see is unknown together, waiting for me to explore. The development of the story was led by myself, and under the guidance of a narrator, I completed the instructions as required to go to the next step. Perhaps thanks to National Geographic, the scenes are very realistic. A penguin leaping out of the water even startled me. What impressed me the most was the interactive part of taking pictures. At first, I tried to pick up the camera according to the logic of the game and found that I couldn't. Later, I tried to pick it up with both hands and succeeded. Before pressing the shutter, you have to take a step closer to the camera's viewfinder to take a picture, which is also very consistent with our daily use habits, which surprised me.


In contrast, in Paper Birds, I'm the audience passively accepting the story, and in National Geographic Explore VR I'm the player, and I need to explore how to move forward. The scenes and interactions of both are well done, making me feel immersed.

BAD GENIUS

The film is adapted from the sensational cheating case in the Asian examination room in 2014, telling the story of the genius scholar Lynn who cheated in the examination room with a high IQ to make huge profits.

Although Lynn's family is poor, she has good grades and started helping rich children cheat for money. But she couldn't remember so many answers by herself, so she decided to bring Bank, who was also from a poor family, with her.

The film has a tense structure and rich lens language, giving people a strong sense of substitution, and at the same time triggering the audience to think about good and evil.

Action 1

The night before the scholarship exam, Bank with good grades was hit in a corner and couldn't take the exam, so he couldn't get the scholarship. The need for money made him decide to join Lynn to help others cheat to make money. In fact, it was the wealthy Pat who hired someone to beat him, just to get Bank to join him.

Bank being hit

Two guying beating Bank

A corner

2022-09-26-16-16-49.mp4

Action 2

Bank and Lynn quickly answered and recited answers on the SAT in order to pass the answers on. The success of the two geniuses is the key to cheating. They will answer papers ahead of time and pass the answers to candidates in Thailand, taking advantage of the time difference so that candidates know the answers before they enter the exam room.

Examination room

Writing

2022-09-26-17-01-39.mp4

Action 3

Lynn left the exam room early by vomiting, recalling the answers as she walked, and sending them to students in Thailand. At the same time, the invigilator who noticed something was wrong was chasing her, so she moved very fast.

Corridor outside the exam room

Pass the answer as she goes

2022-09-26-21-14-23.mp4

Week 6

Shader graphs

For my midterm VR project, I will build a scene of planets in outer space, so I searched for some shader graph screenshots suitable for the planets for me to learn from.

Glitter

The first one is a glitter effect. The whole process began with a picture of random colorful dots. It takes me some time to download the different pictures and insert them into the node called Sample Texture 2D to find out the one produced the best result.

The second effect is the Rift Sphere, which I really like because it changes the shape of the original sphere and brings it closer to the surface of the real planet. The dreamy colors also make the planet look more beautiful, and at the same time, it is changing its shape randomly and vibrantly. To fit my skybox more closely, I chose purple and the rift became bigger.

2022-10-10-17-50-26.mp4

I ended up putting together random combinations on the interface, adding new nodes, etc. and enjoying playing with the effects. The effect that came out was very surprising to me, the surface looked flowing, and like glittering sand on the surface of the planet, combined with the shimmering outer space skybox, making people feel very immersive.

Oliver: The shader graphs you created are fantastic! They really fit a scene in space or dream. I think it will be much more amazing in a VR project.

Jiapei: Wow this is amazing! It really looks like situating in the universe but a universe with great creativity!

Week 11

When it comes to enhancing the senses with AR, the first thing to strike my mind is hearing. Therefore, I use this project to express a deep, tranquil, ethereal, and distant sound. I hope to use AR to express the feeling that people in music are in emptiness, depression, and powerlessness, but also implies hope and strength. So I set the scene of a man in deep water, about to sink but not struggling, with driftwood and moving boats not far away but out of reach. Viewers are surrounded by the shark, bubbles, the radiating light, and shifting shapes, strengthening sensory enhancement.


The hardest part of this process is getting familiar with the features of AR. Unlike previous VR, AR production needs to consider the combination of the project and the real scene and the actual effect of each object on the phone screen. For example, the radiant light I plan to put on top of the character's head works well in the STYLY production interface but is almost invisible when imported into my phone. Therefore, in future creations, I need to learn more about AR works, and strive to make virtual and reality echo.

Week 12

In the process of exploring AR works, I found that I need to find a way to integrate the AR world with the real world in order to better utilize the characteristics of AR. Therefore, I came up with the concept of expressing the fusion and contrast of nature and modern life.

The characteristic desert landscape of the Middle East made me decide to use water and plants as the main elements of my works, and blue and green naturally became the main colors. At the same time, I hope to add human elements, so I designed an AR clothing that the audience can wear.

For the music, I chose soothing music with the sound of water, birds chirping, and the sound of swaying leaves to match my scene.

During the authoring process, model importing remains a challenge. STYLY often has flashback problems, and there are still many modifiers that cannot be used.