Animation & Spatial Audio

My Assets

About the process:

Our final asset list includes a desk, space junk, fountain (running water sound), projector camera (vintage playing film sound), bird (chirping sound), control panel (beeping sound), treadmill, running character, walking person, food stand, door, and a chair.

 For the animations in this assignment, we used a combination of Mixamo, Maya animating, and Unity animations. All of these animation styles worked well because we made sure to use a method that made sense for the object. For example, Mixamo for the people animations, Unity for the sliding door since it will eventually rely on player interaction, and Maya for the satellite. 

We started by discussing how we wanted the overall aesthetics of our project to look. We decided to go for a more low-poly, simplistic approach rather than trying to make it look too detailed or realistic.

At first, modeling was a little bit challenging since none of us had any prior experience. Some of us used the built-in Maya tutorials which we found very helpful to understand the basics of modeling and animation. One person used Cinema 4D which had a learning curve but the online resources available allowed for quick learning. One thing we experienced was the materials not initially importing into Unity correctly. We learned how to approach this and are on our way to developing a solution.

The spatial audio portion of this project was pretty easy. One of the main challenges was finding sounds that were open source. We found a website (freesound.com) where we can use the sounds if we cite our sources. 

Another obstacle we ran into was combining our individual Unity projects. Initially, we had all imported and configured our objects within our own scenes, but we learned that we should do it one at a time, export the package and send it to one another so that they all ended up in the same scene. 

Overall, we all learned a lot from this assignment because it was our first opportunity to really get our hands dirty and actually start creating tangible assets.