Category: Collaborative Unit

Problems with FBX File Types

Unfortunately again after having a number of technical issues and needing to learn the different and new methods of exporting the FBX files with animations for Unity we came accross some further issues that we needed to find a way to resolve in the time that we had left. So due to some file names changes and some animations not linking to the original base models that we had in place I had to find a solution to have these working in the scene with the time we had left. So i layered the different changed versions of the models on top of one another so they could be set active and inactive at different times depending on which animation was ready to play.

Animation Importing and Sequencing

All of the models and animations were imported into the Unity project and placed into the appropriate areas of the scene.

The script to trigger the animations became very complex and I admit could have been done a lot better if i used scripted events properly but i chose to do it this way because i knew it would and could work in the time I had left to finish these scenes. In the images below I had to create a long list of public items in the script such as the different animations, animation triggers, the dialogue boxes and also the different versions of the seagull models.

After all of the public items were set up then it was simply a long and ordered list of which animations and objects would trigger and how long it would spend on those items inbetween. So the different versions of the seagull models were set active and inactive at certain points and the animations would play for so many seconds until the next animation was ready to start next.

Adding a Navigation Guide

Due to our lack of tutorial and general player guidance in this version of the project I wanted to add some form of guidance for the player in this prototype of the experience. So to do this i added a small faded orange marker which moves up and down kind of like a small icon that will hopefully give the player a sense of direction. There is one placed on the beach next to the seagulls and another that spawns after the first seagull dialogue on the pier to guide the player to that next section.

Creating the Pier Scene

The pier scene is created in a very similar way to the beach scene so that when the player enters next to the ice cream cart they will trigger a collider which will spawn the pier seagull models and the animation sequence and dialogue bubbles will appear working in the scene. This scene will also trigger 20 seconds after the ice cream eating mini game that was created by Yiran and Lin.

Adding the Crying Child

In the pier scene of the script it features a crying child after the player eats all of the ice cream and we had the sound arts student also create a sound file specifically for this. Due to time constraints the animation students couldnt model this character in time and so found and edited a model on the asset store which look and worked great with a simple crying animation that we could loop. However… we the materials and textures somehow went strange during exporting and so we accidentally made a small devil child as you can see from the images below which does work but also looks like a little sister from Bioshock… arguably terrifying but also we just had to keep it in for the moment because of how funny it was in the scene.

Adding the Speech Bubbles in Sequence

Now that all of the animations and triggers for the animations of the seagulls are in place I now needed to add in some synced speech bubbles that would also contain the dialogue to show and appear at certain points. The speech bubbles for each dialogue scene are set up using animators to trigger the bubbles at certain time stamps in the scenes that are mostly synced to the dialogue in the scene. These bubbles also appear on the pier scene as well. The only unfortunate thing is due to how these are set up I did not know the best way to add the interactivity because they despawn after each short dialogue scene so this is something i would need to rethink in the future for this version.

Updates to the credit scene

Yiran found a perfect new skybox for the credits scene which makes it looks so much nicer and also works out well because it kind of shows that its a sunset and an end of the day for the seagulls at the end of the experience which works very well overall. She sent my through this skybox and I then applied this to our final version of the experience.

Removing the City Scene

After we tried merging the scenes and the different assets/scripts that we had all worked on we found that the only problem was loading the city scene. We had some issues where others were using the OVR platform instead of the XR rig and when we tried to swap it out for the correct version as you can see in the image below it was just a grey screen and it just woulndt work in a VR headset. We were limited for time and couldnt resolve this issue and so unfotunately it ended up on the cutting room floor for the time being unless we revisit this project in the future as we hopefully plan to have a more completed version with more polish in the future.

Additions to the Environment

I thought that it would be nice to add a few more little elements around the environments and might as well utilise some of the test models that were given to us from the animation students and so I found it really funny to have a few of them sat in the Beach chairs around the area.

Creating the Final Build

After we had tried to achieve as much as we can before our final crit and deadline we were in a good place to try and achieve a fully playable build and while in the Unity file there is of course 5 scene that were created for this experience we knew that we would need to cut the city scene for now and so we sequenced it all so that after the sky scene the player would then go straight to the credits instead as you can see in the screenshot below. Overall the final build worked greay with minimal issues and we were extremely happy that it was fully playable and working from start to finish.

The Introduction Scene

After creating the original basis for the introduction scene I then wanted to develop it further to include the original starting line that we were going to include from the script written by Lin which was the ‘Water goes in Water goes out’ and ‘Oh its my feet’. So to simulate this I made it so that the XR Rig was fixed in place and the player would not be able to walk or move around within this scene and I then created a white sphere and added the seagul feet so if the player looks down they might feel like they have the body of a seagull which i thought would be quite funny for the player.

As an introduction for the player which is similar to the credits, there will be a series of different texts appearing on screen. We have now created a couple of texts which explain to the player how to play the game including what the triggers and grips do with some small instructions on how to grab and eat objects in the game just to generally show the player what they can do during the experience. This was again created using a series of PNG files that are coloured in Unity and shown together in sequence using the Animator.

The Credits Scene

After mostly completing the general framework for the credits and introduction scene I felt that the island could look much better and more interesting so i went online again to the asset stores and found some new island models and assets which i felt made the scene feel much more welcoming and more interesting for the player to look around during these short sequences in the experience.

Adding Audio to the Sky Scene

Now that the sky scene is completely set up to incorporate the player standing on top of the seagull I then began to add the audio dialogue for the scene. The dialogue is told through three parts so three speech bubbles appear over time which the player can also grab using their controllers to throw and move around.

Sky Scene Boundary Borders and Wing Animations

When testing the sky scene I realised that there will definately need to be some boundary walls that stop the player from falling off the seagull while moving and so these were simply created using some box colliders with no mesh renderers so they would stop the player from falling and be invisible during gameplay.

To also add some movement and life to the scene I thought it would be great to have a slight animation which actually made the wings flap up and down in a loop to simulate the idea of the seagull actually flying through the sky. This was done simply using an animation which roated each wing up and down to the same position so that they would loop smoothly through the scene.

Importing the Animation Progress

Syncing Up the Animations

After receiving some of the intial animations for the beach scene I started to look into how these can be organised together in one animator that could be triggered during gameplay. So initially i would have the idle animation as the default in the animator and then have public strings labelled ‘BInt01’ etc. which to me means Beach Interation 1 and they will be all labelled in this way. This way in the script I can time the events so that I could play animation string 1 which will then play loop back to the idle animation after completing and then the next string can be accessed and so on until all have been completed.

Triggering Animations

Now that some animations were set up and working in the scene I had to find a way to trigger these animations when the player walks over to the seagulls. So i set up another box collider around the seagulls which will be used as a trigger so that when the player enters the collider and sees that they are tagged as ‘Trigger’ the animation that is on the seagulls will play. The plan is to then have the idle animation as the default that is always running on loop and then the animation scenes will play on the enter of the trigger. This method will be used for all of the animations throughout the experience to play in one after the other or on a certain event or trigger caused by the user or player.

Scene Management

After the general framework was set up for each scene to transiton to one another while some are timed at certain points and others are triggered. However when we initially tried this transition you could see a slight stutter or it felt strange to have the scene just change instantly so we knew that we would need a scene transition effect during the experience. One of the initial ideas was to create an Iris wipe which we werent quite able to figure out the best way to achieve this so i instead used a black canvas that would appear infront of the players main camera and would grow and shrink from the middle of the players field of view to create a wipe transition effect.

This effect is then triggered at certain points in the experience which then causes the wipe to appear for a few seconds, then the scene will change and the same canvas will start in reverse in the new scene which will then wipe to show the new scene the player has entered. Currently this transiton is up to 10 seconds which may be a long amount of time but it works in the grand scheme of things at this stage.

Working Model and Animation Import

After we had the very long week of trying and failing to add the models with animation, earlier in the week we finally had some success after the animation students changed some elements of the rig and mesh while also learning new ways to export the model for Unity We eventually had the model mostly working in a unity scene as shown in the images below:

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The only slight issue we still have seems to be with the wings but the rest of the body is working and looks great for now so if we have time we can try to resolve this but at the moment it will be fine for our short concept!

We then spent time trying to export test animations and luckily again after some trial and error we were able to get it all wokring and some images below show the animation files appearing in the scene and having an effect on the model as shown in the images below:

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The image below shows one of the final models that is fully working and animated and the only issue that remains is the wings looking a bit jagged but in the grand scheme we can overlook this for now while we develop the rest of the project and try to add in the rest of the animations.

Finalising navigation and Teleportation

Initially last week I added in a full teleportation area that the player could move around but we wanted to have specific points that the player could navigate to around the beach so i started to add anchors around the different areas that the player could teleport to as shown in the image below:

However after some tests and moving around the anchor points I realised that this did not work overly well and felt very restricted for the player So we decided to go back to the full teleportation area. The player also has access to the continuous turn provider in the game as well to reposition themselves after they teleport.

However after further discussions and tests with the group, Yiran had the great idea that we could have continuous movement in the experience so that this is how the seagull walks and the teleportation is how the seagull flys which we felt was genius for this experience. So now the player has the option to teleport around the beach using the right trigger or using the left joystick to walk around the beach which after some tests worked extremely well for the experience. We just need to make sure to explain this in the tutorial instructions for the player/user.

In the story the player needs to transition from the beach to the pier so i decided that after including the idea of walking and flying, that the player should fly to the pier after being prompted to. So I have added a larger teleportation anchor on the pier where if the player points their teleportation point at it, they will appear on the pier fence.

This was then also replicated for the ice cream stand so if the player points their controller at the stand they will ‘fly’ over to it and then this is where they will start the mini game to eat ice cream and the child starts to cry. However some boundaries will need to be added to stop the player from falling off the pier or ice cream cart during the experience.

Creating the Credits

I also created the credits scene for the end of the experience which i created as a seperate scene and kept it fairly simple so tha the player would stand stationary on a small island where if they look around they will see both the seagulls sat behind them. The credits were created as simple PNGs from Illustrator that go through the full list of credits of us in VR, The 3D animation students and the BA sounds arts students and also my friend Alex who provided one of the voices for the game. The transition for the credits is a simple fade in and fade out animation for the different sprites in the scene.

Creating the Menu Scene

After creating the credits I then copied the same scene and I then plan to use this as a base for the menu. I still need to research into creating a VR menu that will have a button to start the experience but in this scene we wanted to have the ‘Water goes in water goes out’ dialogue and so ive placed the XR rig in a certain position with the seagull feet below the player so they can see that and think they are a seagull in this moment while also serving this point of the narrative.

Adding Eating Interactivity

One very simple interaction that the player can do in this game are areas where they can eat certain foods in the environment. So I found a ‘fries’ model on turbosquid and added this into the scene, ready for that particular animation and i seperated it so that one fry would be interactive and you could grab it out of the packet by pressing the inner grip button.

A collider was then added to the player camera so the player wil always have a collider on their head which can act as the players ‘mouth’ during the game. So that when they lift the fry towards their head it will dissapear and play an eating noise when they do so.

This was achieved simply by having an audio source attached to the head collider that had the eating sound effect and adding a tag to the ‘food’ assets so whenever they collide the food will be destroyed and the sound effect will play and this worked very well overall during the tests.

Adding Hitting Interactivity

One of the funny elements in our game was slapstick comedy and being able to hit the other seagulls with certain objects or even hitting them with the speech bubbles and so I added some code so that whenever the player grabbed certain objects and used those objects to hit the seagulls, a sound effect would play. This overall also works very well so whenever they collide you feel like your hitting them and this will hopefully be adapted further to trigger a hit animation whenever they collide as well to add to the comedy factor of this interaction.

Teleporation Sky Scene

After mostly finishing the teleportation for the beach and pier scene I wanted to then add this to the sky scene and this one does not have continous movement but three teleportaiton anchors that the player can move around if they choose to or they can simply choose to stay on the seagulls back during the short time they will spend in this environment.

VR Storyboard

During this week we have spent more time finishing the VR storyboard to now include all of the scenes from the original script all drawn out with written dialogue. The full Storyboard was then captured using the Tiltbrush software and edited together to show the video below:

Problems with importing models

Marianna sent me the final versions of the hand models for the seagull as an FBX file and we had some initial issues with the file versions and ways that we need to export the model and initially the files would appear like in the image below:

But after some further tests and different methods of exporting from Maya which included myself downloading the .mb file and uploading directly to the Unity folder we were able to get the model working! The animation didnt seem to work for the hand models and Marianna believed this might be a problem with the mesh or rig which we agreed we can look into further as they develop the rigs and models over time.

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Hand Position Issues

While we were able to get the hand models fully visible and smoothed in the version you see in the images above for Unity there were some new problems that I faced with the position of the hands showing in the Unity scene.

Eventually after some trial and error and using the advice given to me after speaking with Herman to create a parent where the positions could be changed it eventually worked and the players hands appeared properly in the scene to match the users controller.

Further Issues with Model imports and animations

Marianna and Esme had there models to a very good point where the rigs were nearing completion and they had some test idle animations that they wanted to see how they looked in the Unity scene. However… we had a great number of issues over this week with importing the models in which we needed multiple teams calls and file transfers to try and get these files working over the passed few days which took up quite a lot of time and trial & error from us.

The initial problem that we faced was the model exporting in a very low poly manner in which the model was missing its textures and appeared on the screen in sometimes very strange ways as shown in the image below:

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However after multiple attempts and trying out different ways of exporting the model through Maya and we eventually managed to get a model that was mostly smoothed and polished which would appear in the scene static with no animation.

We then attempted to add the model again but this time with the animation and we faced a even bigger issue where only the eyes and beak would export resulting in this being the full model on dispay:

This for us was very worrying and we needed to spend a couple days and evenings googling different methods and trying new ways of importing the model which resulted in us accidentally making a little family of seagulls shown in the image below that are also exported in very different ways:

We were in the end able to export the animations but it would only effect the eyes and beaks so the rest of the seagulls body would remain stationary while the eyes and beak moved around on their own. While this wasnt ideal it did show that the animations would work and Esme & Marianna took this information and believed it was a problem with the rig and mesh and will continue to look into this and try to solve the issue over the coming week.

Testing Sound Effects

In this weeks meeting we met with the sound students Kiro and Jiachen again and they had developed quite a lot of work and sounds over the passed week including the background music for the beach scene and the romantic music for the sky scene which we were all extremely impressed by and already added it into the project! So in its current iteration theyre music and some sounds they recorded now play in the current Unity project which works extremly well.

Merging the Files

Myself and Yiran had been working on seperate files for the time being but we decided that we would now need to merge since we are quite happy with the scenes mostly and so we spent the day sending over files and packages to one another where everything is now in one master file and all accessible together. This means we can now also look into scene management and transition changes for the project.

The Sky Scene

Now that Yiran has sent through the scenes and assets that she used for the City and Sky scene, I could now start developing the scene further for the flying section of the story. Using the Skybox and Cloud effects that Yiran found and created I used these as the base to now add a seagull model that the player would stand on during this funny scene.

Using the models sent through from Marianna and Esme I molded and changed the model slightly to create a much larger seagull that the player would stand on and overall it isnt perfect but i felt this added to the comedy value of the experience. An XR rig was also added onto the seagulls back so that now you can view this in VR and some sound effects for wind, wings flapping and the romantic music were added as well to really bring the scene together.

Finishing the Beach & Pier Scene

Now that Yiran has sent through all her city assets I decided that for continuity that these would be much more suitable to include in the background of the beach and so I wanted to get this scene completed and fully polished this week which I was very happy overall with the outcome.

The initial inspiration for the beach was going to be like Blackpool pier and so i started to look at how i could make this scene contained but more interesting so i added an elevated level with some more buildings and completely filled the background with the new building assets which overall turned out very well. When you view these scenes now in Virtual reality from a smaller scale it looks very contained now as a scene.

I also decided to add just a little element of animation into the scene to make it feel a bit more alive and so i found a boat model on the asset store and added a simpe looping movement animation so it would move around with the waves if the player were to look out in the distance.

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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

Final Updates to the Script/Story

Over the passed week Lin has continued to develop and finalise the script/storylines that we wanted to include for the overall narrative. After sending her my draft updates for the script she took some of the recommendations that I had made and also added some more additional dialogue, removed some and amended some scenes to make a more cohesive narrative. She also felt that it would be better to include some more dialogue and story beats within the city scene because initially there was only a couple lines but now she has included a short food/dinner sequence which we can add to the overall experience if we have time towards the end of the project.

Developing the Environment in Unity (Beach & Pier)

Myself and Yiran have spent more time over the passed week working on the Unity environments which included now adding in the models that Esme & Marianna had created to see what they will look like in virtual reality. I have now added in the XR interaction tool into the Unity scene to see how they will work and overall i felt that the results worked very well and looked great for the scene, the models they created really suited the environment as well as the feel for the whole experience.

I have also added in some more assets into the scene such as Benches and Bins to add some more detail to the pier. I also want to continue to develop the backgrounds and add in moving water from the Unity standard assets over the next week to complete the environment so its ready to add in interactions etc.

Problems with Unity Collab

Myself and Yiran are both working on this project in Unity with my focus being on the Pier scene and hers being the city environment and it was suggested to us that we could use Unity Collab to work on the same project build. However we had a number of problems where we had to test this feature multiple times over multiple builds to get it working.

We needed to change passwords, permissions and many other aspects to get this working but luckily we were able to upload and download eachothers versions of the projects with great success which means that we are now prepaired to combine the scenes and work together on this one single file. We will also continue to have backups on our own machines incase anything goes wrong with the cloud versions or uploading overlaps with one another.

Sound List

For this project we will soon be joined by BA sound art students who will help us to create the music and sound assets for our projects. We then all got together to write down the list of different sounds, music and assets we would need for our virtual reality project.

Identify the soundtrack:

• Funny music like spongebob squarepants 
• Mini Game background music
• Romantic music while flying to another scene

Informational:

• Dialogue between two seagulls
• Bubble popup “Duang”
• Seagull sounds (as first person player at the beginning
• Teleport Sound (wings flapping)
• Eating Ice Cream Sound effect
• Tripping Sound Effect
• Mini game sound effect (Ticking clock and winner)

Environmental Sounds:

• Sea Waves
• City Background Noise
• Baby Crying
• People walking around saying “Sorry”

Group Meeting (Wed 9th Feb)

On wednesday this week we all got together for our weekly group meeting to discuss the current developments with the project. We had discussed the presentation that we had created for the Mid term crit while also showing the final script and unity developments to the rest of the group to get some feedback and opinions from everyone. The 3D animation students also discussed that they have now made a ice cream cart asset to go with the eating mini game as well as now finising the rigging for the characters which looked fantastic which means they are now read for animation and sounds in the final experience.

Mid Term Crit Presentation (Wed 9th Feb)

After we had our group meeting, myself , Yiran and Lin went to the classroom to have our Mid crit presentation of the current progress so far with the project. We put together a presentation containing all of the work we have so far from the script and development of the environment as well as Esme & Marianna’s work on the character models and animations they had created.

The feedback we recieved was positive but it was suggested that we needed to give much more detail on the overall gameplay and interactivity for the whole experience because we may not have shown it clearly in the presentation which we agreed with. It was also suggested that we may need to dial back a bit on some of our ideas such as the ice cream eating mini game which was suggested might be slightly too difficult to do in the time frame that we currently have left for the rest of the project.

Voice Recordings (Initial Drafts)

After having our meeting with the group this week and finding out that the rigging of the 3D models that Marianna and Esme had created is coming along very well and will soon be ready for animation, we needed to look into the next steps. While we will soon be developing both the hand drawn storyboards but also the VR storyboards, we will need some voice recordings to give an idea of the timing and animations that they will need to create.

So I felt that it would be helpful if myself and with the help of my friend Alex (again greatly appreciated), we could record the lines from the final script to give a general idea of how long the animations will be even if we use these as the final recordings for the project. So we spent the morning together recording the lines in different variations and speeds to have voice examples that are ready for animations but could also be used in the final product if needed (Please excuse my Blue Yeti Mic set up, best i can do…).

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Script Adjustments and Recommendations

Lin has continued to work on and develop the script over the past week but said that she was having some trouble in certain areas tying the stories together and how the player could progress through and so she asked us for some ideas, recommendations and feedback for the script. I took the current content of her script and created my own draft adding in some new elements and changing certain areas to see how it could be adapted further. An example of my draft version of the script can be seen in the link below:

Pier and Beach Development

Now that the initial storyline and script is in development i started to search for assets and creating a base unity environment for our project. After looking through the unity asset store as well as turbo squid I found a model of a pier which i then changed and rescaled into a much larger pier and used different aspects of the model to reshape it to fit the original idea that we had. I also found some beach assets including chairs and umbrellas along with some beach textures and terrains that we can use for the beach scene of the experience. For now I have added a blue plane for the water but I know that the unity standard assets have water effects and animations which we can use for this project. This is something that i will continue to look into and develop for our project.

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Initial Gameplay Ideas

For the gameplay interactions while the story is being written and processed I started to read through the False Knees comics and see any oppurtunities where interactions could be adapted for Virtual Reality as I have listed below:

Initial Storyline Ideas (adapting the content)

During our discussions over the week and our face to face meetings as a group we found that a great way to layer out the story and adapting the content was to actually use the comics as a type of storyboard/inspiration for the full narrative.

Using the comics as demonstrated below we divided the scenes and used the comics to show the narrative progression of which comic storyline we will start with and how it will progress including a fantastic idea from Yiran to use the Seagull flying meme as the means of transporation between scenes for the player to stand on another Seagulls back to avoid having to create a flying mechanic with the short time that we are given.

Ideas for Player Interactions

I also decided to write down some possible notes and interaction/gameplay oppurtunities that we could use to tell the story in a Virtual Reality format from being a third animal player while also being a bird watcher who observes the experience from afar watching the animals behaviour.

Face to Face meetings

On tuesday morning of this week we had the oppurtunity to meet other courses who are also working on a collaborative unit to try and find team members for our project. I was able to talk to a lot of different people from many courses such as MA Games Design, MA 3D animation, MA Visual Effects and many others who were all very interesting to talk to and had some great ideas and interests in what projects they are interested in creating.

Initially i started by talking to some of the other students about a ‘Paper Man’ adaptation which some were interested in especially some of the MA Games design students who even discussed the possibility of mixing their interest of creating board games with Augmented reality to create a paper airplane game adaptation. I felt that this idea would be extremely interesting and very unique and was something I initially wanted to discuss further after meeting all of the other students. I also met quite a few of the MA 3D animation students who showed me a number of their showreels and the type of modelling and animations that they have previously worked on which was great to get a feel for the type of projects they are interested in.

Choosing Team Mates

For this project we are also required to work in teams from members of our own course in MA Virtual Reality. I started to talking to all of my coursemates and the ideas that they had but I am not going to be working with Yiran and Lin on a comic adaptation chosen by Lin for virtual reality. I had also began contacting some of the students that i met during the meetup this week such as the three MA 3D animation students but the others had also been talking to them as well so we will now be workiing as a team of five with Esme and Marianna from MA 3D animation.

Adaptatation of False Knees

After joining Yiran and Lin for the project i started to research further into False Knees which is a webcomic written by Joshua Barkman. The comic is shown as ‘an illustrated guide to animal behaviour’ and focuses on short black comedy sketches of the animals interacting with the world and other animals around them. This has the oppurtunity to create a very interesting comedic VR adaptation that could combine a number of these short stories to create a single longer storyline for a 5 minute long experience.

First Group Meeting

This morning the group had our first meeting to discuss more details and aims for this project. We met in the library and discussed the comic False knees and the different ways that this could be adapted into a virtual reality project while also assigning the different tasks and steps that we would need to take to successfully adapt this and work as a group. We also wanted to find out more of what the MA 3D animation students would want to work on and see the different skill sets they have in the range of both animations and modelling assets for the unity build.

This week we were briefed on our new project which is the Collaborative Unit in which we need to work with other course majors such as games design, 3D animation, Visual effects, Sound arts and many other options to create our XR project. The main objective of the brief is to create an immersive adaptation of a clip from a selection of sources such as a short film, animation, a cartoon or a short story etc.

My initial Ideas

We were given the options for comedic options for adaptations and some of the options were immersive bot stories which were created by Netflix using Aritificial intelligence that generated different types of movies. Among these options was ‘The first Holiday film written entirely by bots’ which i thought would be quite interesting and funny for a VR adaptation due to the silly dialogue and very strange and quirky interactions that the player could try. The whole film mostly takes place in a cabin as well which would work well for the initial time frame of this project.

Paper Man (2012 Animated short film)

Another idea i had for an adaptation is Disneys 2021 animated shoirt film ‘Paperman’ which tells the story of an accountant trying to find and gain the attention of a woman he met at the train station using paper airplanes. I felt that this is a nice and simple short story that could be very interesting to adapt in Virtual Reality. Firstly the art style would work very well by having the whole environment and characters shown in black and white with some minor hints of colour such as the red lipstick in the original cartoon. For the gamemplay and interactivity I felt it could be fun to create a type of minigame out of the paper airplane scene in which the character is triyng to throw planes through the window on the other side of the street.

This could be adapted for VR by having the player grab and throw airplanes across the street while also needing to do it subtly so that the boss doesnt see you doing this. The woman could also be moving up and down different floors so there are multiple target windows that the player would need to aim for over the games duration.

La Luna (2011 Animated Short Film)

La Luna is a 2011 animated short film created by Disney Pixar and tells the story of a young italian boy, his father and grandfather and their job of cleaning and arranging the stars from the night sky on the surface of the moon. I felt again that visually this would be interesting to show a light hearted and simple art style to the experience that would also have very little dialogue with a story told visually to the player.

In the terms of interactivity and gameplay the player could row the boat to get to the moon, and the player could also walk aroud the moons surface using a sweeper/broom, to move around stars that could continously be moving and changing. A time limit could also be shown to the player or perhaps a competitive or guided nature with the other NPC characters that will be present throughout the experience.

Finding my team mates

Everyone in the course has been added to an online Padlet which has everyones contact details, portfolio/blog and interests to see options of who we can work with on this project. It has also been arranged for this coming tuesday to meet these students face to face so that we can discuss ideas for the project while also finding people with similar interests that we would want to collaborate with.