Development to the Unity Environment
During the past week myself and Yiran have been working more on the different Unity Environments, Yiran is focusing on the cityscape scene still and I have continued to work on the beach and pier. Esme has now sent me through some more assets including the ice cream cart and also the ice cream model to be used for the Pier scene and also the ice cream eating part of the story. We initiall had some issues with sending over the files and accessing the textures but after they were sent through seperately as .mtl files the textures worked great in the scene and environment!
Background Scenery
Using some free assets that I found online through the asset store I have added some background buildings for the time being to make the scene look much more lively and not so empty if the player looks off into the distance which i think works well especially when the player is at a smaller scale so the buildings are much further away.
Adding Teleportation
We have also spent some time over the week looking at implementing navigation for the whole experience via teleportation so the player will be able to move around certain areas in each scene using teleportation rather than continuous movement. We also plan to have a flapping wing sound effect incorporated every time that the player teleports which we think will work very well to make the transition seem more natural and a part of this world and story (while also possibly helping the player believe they are a seagull…).
Speech Bubbles
After having meetings and discussions with our lecturers we began to look further into the adaptation and how we could add speech bubbles to the experience. I spent one night typing out all of the dialogue from the script to create PNG files of the dialogue shown as speech bubbles which i also tried to match the typography and style of the comics so it would translate further into the experience. Below are some example screenshots from Illustrator as well as the PNG’s now added into the Unity scene. Each PNG will also have a box collider that will be interactive for the player during the scenes.
Elements of Interactivity
Most of our experience incorporates the use of mostly grabbing and moving around, throwing or hitting with different objects that are in the scene such as the speech bubbles, different food items and also objects to hit each other with. So i went into the beach and pier scene to start trying to incorporate some interactivity by having the speech bubbles interactive with a box collider and also adding in items such as the fries and stick that the player will now be able to pick up in the environment.
Adding audio to the objects and possibly spatial sound…
VR Storyboarding
Over this week myself, Marianna and Esme spent time working through and finalising storyboards created in Tiltbrush which will help us have a full storyline walk through in a VR app while also giving the animation students a new method of storyboarding for their own blogs and submission.
Below are some screenshots and a timelapse capture of some of the storyboards which were drawn for this experience. We will spend time soon capturing and recording the full storyboard with a voice over for the final submission.
Meeting the BA sound arts students
On Monday of this week we had a session online with the BA sound arts students where we all spoke about our interests and did a very short introduction for one another. We were then told who had been assigned to our group which was based on what the lecturer felt would be best suited for each of the sound students styles and needs. We were then put in a break out room with Kiro and Jiachen where they showed us some examples of their previous sound arts work and we also had a general run through of the project, our presentation and progress so far. After these initial discussions we arranged to have them join our weekly meeting on Wednesdays and exchanged contact details.
Catch Up meeting with the full group
On Wednesday we had another catch up meeting to go through the current progress of the project with Kiro and Jiachen meeting the group in person and also introducing them to the MA 3D animation students. This session went very well and we all discussed and asked questions to one another so that everyone was on the same page and understood the requirements and deadlines/milestones for the project.