Weekly Workshop

Week 10

Treasure seeking AR scene

My concept is to use VR to narrate a treasure seeking experience undersea. While the diver was diving in the deep ocean, he saw the seaweeds swinging and the rocks on the reefs. Suddeny he saw a treasure box. He came over but couldn't open it. With curiosity and onset expectation, he returned to the land.

I have the rocks and the treasure box, the fish and seaweeds as gameobjects. Then I added the seaweeds directly from the STYLY model library. The seaweed model itself is already animated.

Then I added the fish. I wanted the fish to swim around the user. As a result, I added an orbit animation and at the same time a rotation animation to the fish, so that it looks like it was swimming around.

Finally, I used exisiting bubble particles in the STYLY library to create an underwater feeling, trying to make the scene more immersive.

In the bedroom

After testing, I realized that the height I set for the fish is still too high. This is because I set the height according to the height of the human figure sample in the buildup scene in STYLY. However, the height of the human sample figure may not match the actual height of users(me). So sometimes we need to make readjustments after testing.

In the common space

Comparing the two scenes, I think my scene is more immersive when displayed in a smaller space.

Week 4

Plot action warm up

Models and animations from Mixamo

Train to Busan, 2016

I picked a classic scene in the thriller movie Train to Busan. In the movie, passengers were on a train and they heard noises from the other end of the cabin. Nervous as they were, they stood up slowly and started looking at the end, trying to figure out what was going on. Then they saw a zombie-like man crawling on the floor, with inhumane moaning coming out of his mouth. The passengers were frightened and started running panically.

I adapted to the movie and created a similar scene. The story takes place in the student dorm of NYUAD, and is recorded by the monitor. A girl was walking in the hallway and she saw someone moving on the floor. She was nervous and was slowly sneaking backward. She saw a guy crawling on the floor in a very alien way. The girl was frightened and ran away.

There are 3 shots in my project. The first shot is the girl checking the corner in suspicion. This creates a nervous atmosphere. The second shot is the man crawling on the floor. This explains what is happening, and why the girl was nervous. The third shot is the girl running away with panic, looking back to check if the man is following her from time to time. This gives audience the opportunity to put themselves into the shoes of the girl and imagine themselves being followed by a crawling creature.

Furthermore, I adopted a third-person perspective by using the perspective of the dorm monitor machine. This is beneficial because it explains the plot to audience very well. While if to adapt this story to VR, then audience will be the person that is present, but "doesn't exist". This may influence their experience with the thriller story, since they know they are not participating in the story.

Here is the camera error that I encountered while working on the project.

Week 3

Storyboard

Week 3

360 picture

This is a 360 scene of a local beach I took went a went there the last weekend.

Since my story happens from the first person perspective, this scene fits well and can convey the story.

Since there's no conversation happening in the story, I will rely heavily on the changes in the scene to proceed the story.

The tricky part will be how to create the sunshine effect. I don't think if I will be able to make an hour-long 360 video o record the sunset. I'm thinking about creating a shader for the skybox to mimic the sunset.

Another thing that troubled me is that, there is too many people appearing in this 360 picture, ad it's distracting viewers from the main story. I may need to go the beach during a weekday ad take another picture.

Week 2

Hi Xiaoyan, I can't find pictures/video of the scene you made. Deleted by mistake?

Interstellar, 2014

directed by Christopher Nolan

Scene 1

I am always thinking about recreating outer spacial environment or underwater environments via VR. These en vironments are fascinating to me, because the composition and structure of the environment is very different from that we have experienced in everyday life. For example, in underwater, we move slower because we encounter greater resistance underwater. While in space, we move very fast, because it's vaccumned and there is no resistance at all.

That's why I was still very fascinated with the scenes in the film Interstellar, a sci-fi film telling the story about a former NASA pilot, sent to space to find out a planet that would be mankind's new home. The first picture attached is the scene when he fell into the black hole and was in a four-dimensioned structure. The architecture has a simple layout. Basically, it will look like the adding and layering of the infinite rectangular boxes.

To pay a tribute to the original film, I will use the material in the movie scene. In the movie, this 4d structure takes place in a study room. As a result, I will use the textures of bookshelf images and create a surface material.

Scene 2

In scene 2, they arrived on Miller's Planet, which has giant tidal waves. There is little architecture in the scene, but I really like this one, because of its contrast of giant wave and tiny human pilots.

I'm not sure if I can use any textures to generate water. I looked up on Unity Forum, I may need to model the water in 3D softwares and then add shaders to fake the wave.

Week 1

I found a skybox asset that looks cool, and I tried it. It gives me a galaxy-ish feeling. And I decided to keep this style.

I created a sphere, thinking that it can be a planet. I searched for "Jupiter texture" and attached it to the material of the sphere.

Then I imported some lowpoly rocks asset and created a ring of moons.

To add more colors, I found a glowing rock asset and used it to decorate the planet's ring.

What I find challenging:

I created the ring by adding rocks one by one from the top view. So the ring was originally horizontal. Then I wanted to align it with the tilt of the planet. I then figured out that I just need to create an empty parent, and making all the rocks to child of this parent, and then give the parent a tilting angle.

What I find exciting and inspiring:

I was very excited with the functions of the material. You can adjust the metalics and smoothness according to your need. This is making the models more realistic. I wonder how we can be able to adjust only a part of the material of the model? This will be very useful.

I’m inspired by the gem rocks assets I found in assets store. It seems different from the normal lighting lights in Unity. It seems like they applied light to its texture or material.

What did it prompt me to know more about:

I think it will be cool if we can make customized textures and materials. What if I’m making an ore where some of its surfaces are rough and others are smooth?

Next project

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