During this week i have tried further experimenting with my concept for the AR experience in Vuforia. Using the model that i had previously created in Unity and recieving some feedback and input from my tutors I started to experiment with a larger quantity of the model to achieve full coverage of the Vase.
Using an approximate sphere model based on the actual side of the Vase I started to move, rotate and plot all of the different flower models around the Vase. This took me a lot longer than expected due to have to carefully position and rotate all of the models to give a curved effect around the object but I was able to eventually achieve this.
The imags below show the effect live in my webcam which luckily did work successfully and if you rotate the vase around it does give quite a convincing effect that it is moving around the curve with the Vase which is the effect I wanted.
Blooming Animation
While the models work correctly through vuforia by being displayed around the image target I also tried to use some of the animation options in Unity. This meant i could have a concept of the flowers changing sizes, rotating and also offsetting from one another to create a type of pattern. After experimenting with these different animations, I feel confident that this concept will work overall for the final experience.
Exporting my Blender Animation (problems)
Alternative Flower Model
Although the initial flower tutorial i followed did create a nice flower model which i felt would suit this project well, I decided to try out a different tutorial more based on a lily pad to see if I have more success exporting the animation. The screenshots below show some of the steps i followed in creating the flower model.
One aspect of this tutorial I quite enjoyed was the in depth look into the shader section of Blender and creating multiple colour options including shadows and textures which turned out very nice overall.
Unfortunately I still had some troubles trting to export my flower model where the animation does work and when i export the model in different ways only the central petal seems to have any animation and the outer petals dont seem to be moving. I will need to spend some time this week trying to find ways to export my models to then further experiment in vuforia.
Recording Sound
This main theme of this concept is of course around flowers and plants so sound effects of this nature would make sense for the AR experience. I started to go around outside and luckily I am nearby an ecology park where hopefully I would be able to record some different sound effects. I also want to record some water dropplet sound effects now that i have the option of using the lilypad model animation which i think will be suitable for my AR experience.
Next Steps
The next steps for this Augmented reality experience is to achieve a successfully exporting blooming model from Blender and to also find and print a better more visually appealing image target to place on the Vase. As a stretch goal it would be interesting to have another option for an image target which has a different animation effect or plant/flower.