Record of Progress

Winter Quarter

Week 2

Week 3-4

Daniel

• Created a storyboard that detailed the overall journey we wanted our main creature, the deer, to go through. The deer finds itself in a forest, as it runs along a path. As it runs, its surroundings starts to decay and brutalist designed buildings start to rise in replacement of the nature beforehand. As these buildings rise, a metal sheen starts to reflect off of the deer itself, as it itself starts to reflect the transformation of the setting around it. However, like the forest before, the buildings began to crumble and the deer slows down until it collapses within the rubble. A moment passes and the metal carcass starts to open, bringing a new deer into the world. This deer crawls out of the body and begins its run, with a new forest budding around it.

Tony

• Created test models for the trees and buildings, with three variations to their designs. 

• Finished modeling and sculpting of the deer.

• Collected material for the diorama setup. Specifically, a wooden board, that will be laser cut to the desired shape for our animation.

Week 5 Proof of Concept

Daniel

• Refined the storyboards drawn up last week, so that they were easier to understand.

• Animated the initial run cycle of the deer. Reviewed some online tutorials in order to aid in creating the animation itself. A metal coat was also placed onto the deer through the use of a material texture. With an addition to Blender’s already established metallic texture, the coat was easily placed upon the deer.

Tony

• Test out different designs that would work the best for our project. Currently trying out the circular and rectangular designs for the base of our AR diorama. Included our current choice for the AR program, Adobe Aero Space. Used existing assets to test out how it would look from the program to real-life.

Week 6

Daniel and Tony

• Finished up creating the diorama. We ultimately chose to go for a more circular design, to reflect the cyclical nature of the deer’s journey. This would also be reinforced by the loop we were gonna leave the animation on. 

• Furthermore, we set up a test AR scene using assets within Adobe Aero Space to see if the diorama would be able to locate our lasercutted base and load all the components accordingly.

Week 7

Daniel

• Lowered the polycount with the model of the deer itself by adding a decimation modifier and reducing the amount of edges within it.

Tony

• Due to performamce issues in Adobe Aero caused by the trees having too high of a polycount, the trees were remodeled to have a much lower polycount in order to improve performance for the software. Along with the remodeling of the trees they were texture painted as well for placement in the AR scene.

Week 8

Daniel and Tony

• A digital scene was created using the deer model anchor points were applied to the base in order to ensure that the AR scene would be properly displayed when loaded

Daniel

• Reanimated the Deer walk with the help of the following tutorial by Richard Williams. Used the same walk cycle of a horse to make our deer move. This will be the walk cycle that the deer will use in its movement around the diorama. 

• Worked on animating the different states of the deer, specifically with the transformation to its metal coat, and the collapse of the deer itself.

Week 9-10 Prototype

Daniel

• Imported the deer animations into the scene and created the behaviors for each moving model to follow. Placed pins around the base so that the deer would have a path to follow. These pins would also reflect the different stages that the deer will go through. While the deer would walk, the environment would also react. When the walk enters the beginning stages of its life, the trees would start growing. When it moves further, the trees would submerge into the ground, with the buildings starting to rise from the ground. After a certain checkpoint has been met, another batch of trees will rise from the ground, where the cycle will continue to repeat itself. 

Tony

• Printed out the physical deer model through a 3D Printer: PLA filament was chosen for its ease of use and quick post-processing compared to other filaments or methods of 3D printing such as resin. Supports were added to overhangs to prevent collapsing of the model and was printed with a 0.25mm layer height and 10% infill. 

Spring Quarter

Week 11-12

Daniel and Tony

• We decided to remove the full model of the deer and animate the head of the deer amongst a physical stump. This would remove the complexity of having a moving animal against a moving camera. Furthermore, the capabilities of Adobe Aero did not make it easy for us to implement animation into the project. Additionally, Adobe Aero's capabilities in implementing animation was lacking, causing us to move to the software Unity. 

Daniel

• Started the animation again solely in Blender. Using the simplified tree models for the start of the animation, we realized the best course to simulate the growing effect of the assets would be to use the scale features. Otherwise the objects would be visible underneath, preventing the overall diorama to be placed onto the stump.

Tony

• 3D Print deer head: PLA filament, 0.25mm layer height, 10% infill: The mesh did have to be modified to prevent a printing error on the edge of ears which required having the ears to be thickened a bit more on the edges. 

Week 13

Daniel

• Digital models of the trees, and deer head were arranged in accordance with the sketches creating a starting point for the digital scene. With the components of the scene all present, we had a basic idea of the scale at which to place the AR demonstration on the stump itself.

• Added the building models built by Tony and integrated them into the tree model animation.

Tony

• Created a base for the tree stump: consisted of constructing a frame from cardboard that was then layered with spray foam to create a lightweight core for the tree stump. 

• Final versions of the buildings were modeled with a modern brutalist style akin to the skyscrapers we see today in the world.

Week 14

Daniel and Tony

• Troubleshoot Unity bugs with the animation

Daniel

• The final versions of the building models were imported into the digital scene and arranged to create the base version of the AR overlay. Shown in the Unity program, we could visualize how the virtual scene would be displayed and the following behaviors that will follow after the scene begins.

Week 15 (Midterm)

Week 16

Daniel and Tony

• User Testing: noting any difficulties within understanding how to operate the apparatus

• Painting of the tree: Spray paint was used to cover the stump in a lighter shade for the first layer, afterwards a darker shade of acrylic paint was diluted in water and applied to accent the grooves on the surface as well as create a contrast in color to simulate tree bark. Added packaged moss on to the stump to simulate the natural environment the stump is originating from.

Daniel

• Due to issues with creating a workable build for our devices to run, we decided to move away from Unity. We moved on to a different method in which the user utilizes the capabilities of a USDZ file, import into the DropBox for hosting where the viewers would be able to access the digital scene, and assign it a QR code for people to use. The animation would be played on my phone, utilizing its AR capabilities to showcase our work.

Tony

• Remodeled the deer head to avoid the faceted look in the first iteration to give it a more refined look. 

• Texture paint buildings: Shader nodes were used to color the buildings. 

Week 17

Daniel and Tony

• Adjust to player review, Tweaks and Refine

• Details were added to the tree stump using various types of moss to give the stump a more natural and overgrown appearance. 

• Testing out the animation model and attaching it to the sculpture.

Tony

• Remeshed and textured baked deer head reducing polycount from ~190k to ~13k: The deer head was optimized to improve performance for the AR software. Optimization of the model consisted of converting a high polycount model to a low polycount model through remeshing of the high poly model to a lower poly count and baking texture details onto the low poly model. 

Test of Locking the Animation to the Physical Sculpture

Week 18

Daniel and Tony

• Due to issues with animation in Unity, it was decided instead to use the built in AR function of iOS devices utilizing Reality Composer. 

• Reassigned the AR into the program Reality Composer: The AR scene was transferred to the program Reality Composer, due to the programs native support of USDZ filetypes allowing direct import of models into the scene editor and seamless iOS integration.

Tony

• UV Unwrap and Texture Paint: The deer head model was UV unwrapped to provide the necessary data for the pixels of the texture to be mapped onto the model. Utilizing this UV map the deer head was texture painted to resemble a white tail deer. 

• 3D print refined deer head: PLA filament, 0.2mm layer height, 15% infill 

Week 19-20

Image Documentation of the Installation on Exhibition Day