Chalk Shark

As I kid I drew on the sidewalk a lot, and indulge myself in my fantasy world. Thus for this project, I want to make such a virtual world come alive to me through AR.

I wanted to make a 3D chalk shark drawing, that surfaces from the ground drawing. However, I’ve been testing in my apartment hallway and wasn’t testing outside, and it really didn’t look as good as I wanted it to be 🙁

For the programming portion, I modified the code of the AR Controller so that the mesh is always placed sideways (90 degrees) towards the camera.

I made the 3D model and handpainted the texture(in Substance painter and Photoshop)  to give it a hand-drawn quality. I planned to hand particle systems and flipbook textures to animate the water, but I didn’t get that to work, so I’m just animating the two pieces of mesh that represent the water splashes by bobbing them up and down.

Hallway Test Vid:

More Documentation:

 

[My clips are taking hours to load… the official video will come soon.]

I’ve made a fictional story where a woman goes to a therapist and talks about how she sees hallucinations of “Nipples of Venus” everywhere she goes. I’m hoping that the hallucinations are a metaphor for the emotional baggage that people have trouble explaining through words.

 

Augmented Creatures

I ended up using Blender for the entirety of this assignment instead of Unity. It is not really AR in that it is not realtime. Instead, I used image tracking within Blender to map certain image targets. Then, I rendered the animation I wanted superimposed over the original video. I definitely think using Unity probably would have been easier to do than what I did. However, I still learned a lot about FBX files (the main reason I did use Unity is because I could not properly make an FBX of the creature asset I made).

Process

Creating the creature: I made one generic creature in Blender using a series of pentagonal toruses. I animated them as I wanted and the style is inspired by my Creature Clock for deliverable03.

 

Tracking the video: I prerecorded this rather mundane scene of my family’s dining table (honestly, we never eat here tho). Using the Movie Clip Editor within Blender, I detected the features and tracked them throughout the clip. Then, I assigned a plane and a scene using the trackers so that I could map my assets onto that plane.

Arranging the scene: I then created multiple copies of the original asset. Here, you can see the camera movement is calculated based on the previously mentioned tracking.

Time to render: Because I wanted the shadows of the objects to be realistic, I used the cycles renderer. Unfortunately, these measly 372 frames took close to 12 hours to render. Each image here is actually a PNG (ie. it has a clear background)

Putting the two parts together: This was honestly a tad disappointing because after 12 hours of waiting, seeing that black border was not a fun time. I still think it looks cool but, no need to worry because cropping is a thing.

Cropping: After the final cropping, there is a bit of compression, so the quality is a bit reduced, but I am super satisfied with how the shadows appear on the table and the wall.

I worked with Thumbpin for this project. To view our project, follow the link provided.

AR Meditation

Follow this guided meditation to help you relax. Base your breathing patterns on the movements of the entity.

After watching this video and following the meditation, are you relaxed? Or are you more anxious as you watch this boding entity hover over you for an extended period of time?

For this project, I decided to base my project on stress and anxiety. During childhood, whenever I dealt with stress and anxiety, I loved going to my backyard and just stare up at the sky. I enjoyed the soundscape that it immersed me in – the sounds of my pool and fountain, trees rustling, and birds chirping always seemed to calm me down. Since I was back in my childhood home and living in a stressed time, I’ve been going back out there to take Zoom and school breaks.

Then, I started playing with this idea of a conflict between audio and visual. After building my sculpture and running some Unity tests, I realized that since it’s all digital, the installation is much easier to manipulate than if it was in physical, real, space. I thought what if I made the sculpture slightly foreboding as it hovers over the viewer/audience? Then the audio would be trying to get the audience to meditate and de-stress, but there is a lingering feeling of unease from watching the video and watching this thing bob up and down slowly for almost 30 minutes.

My initial idea for this project was to get this sculpture to be floating above my pool because I thought playing around with reflections and transparency would have been cool, but I had troubles with getting the sculpture to appear directly on top of the water, so I had to switch gears.

This project is an AR portal to the top of a cliff that the user can use to explore a virtual mountain area and find a hidden item.

Screenshots:

gifs:

Inspirations:

I used to explore the apartment complex with my friends when I was little. With great creativity, we imagined different worlds and put ourselves into the shoes of various people and living creatures. One of the scenarios was a treasure hunter, a common recreational game that asks for the teamwork among players to obtain hints and find the hidden items.

Inspired by it, I visualized the portal to another world that hid one of the keys (the item the players have to find and collect). Instead of making it vertical like a door to another world, I located the gate on the floor. This was inspired by my another childhood curiosity and creativity regarding manholes. I always wondered what’s at the end of the manhole, as I’ve heard of different usages of manholes like “it’s for sewage” or “it’s a path to access buried cables,” but have never been inside one. As a child, I would imagine the manhole to be something more grand than its actual usage, like serving as a secret transportational tunnel for spies or a portal to another weird interesting world like Wonderland.

Reflecting these childhood imaginations, I narrated the video as if I’m part of a team of two and am following the hints to collect all three keys before other players do.

Process:

I modified free 3D models I downloaded from online in Blender to create the virtual world beyond the portal. Then, I imported those to unity and scripted accordingly using the AR template.

Because it was my first time using Unity to create my own AR project, I spent a large number of hours looking up how to obtain certain effects I wanted. Although I occasionally got annoyed at C# scripting for it not doing what I asked for (at one point, all I was looking for was a constant rotation at a constant speed, which should be able to obtain with a simple line or two of code, but I had no luck and had to satisfy with other alternative effect…), I think situations like that would less frequently happen as I work on more projects on Unity and get use to C# language syntax and the Unity program itself.

Texturing also took a good amount of time, as one of the models refused to show the texture in Unity. Thanks to Hochi, I was able to learn and apply UV mapping and unwrapping in Blender, which I found it very interesting. It also helped me understand why computer graphics course is requiring students to take 3D calculus and matrices before taking it.

Reflection:

Overall, I enjoyed learning Unity and working on this very first AR project, and I’m happy with the outcome of the project. I appreciate everyone in this class for being supportive and providing opportunities to observe and try new things.