Team Progress
Writing progress this week: I sent the script out to 3 proofreaders and received comments from everyone. Together, Emily and I incorporated those comments and completed our final polish of the script!
Animation progress this week: Emily put a lot of work into figuring out how to implement our cursive writing animation with the Blender Grease Pencil, as well as concept art for scenes 3 and 7, and final panels for scene 4.
Technical progress this week: I learned how to implement controller-based interactions in VR, built our core interaction for Scene 2 and spent a lot of time looking into methods for adding our audio to the scenes. I also created many, many more spreadsheets. More on that below.
Audio progress this week: Xavier recorded a song that we will use for scenes 3 and 7, and Emily and I spent some time gathering references for our UI sounds. The two of us also found voice actresses for all of our characters, and we've spent a lot of time trying to figure out the logistics of recording in a pandemic!
My Progress
This week, my goal was to spend one hour working on Unity research and tasks every day. This strategy was really effective for me, and I made a lot of progress over 7 hours! My focuses were:
- Get a handle on David Lobser's controller-based interactables system, and use it to build a VR demo of the match strike scene.
- Research audio optimization and playback methods in Unity, and figure out a good solution. Implement them in a script to schedule audio playback for a non-interactive scene... right now it's a spaghetti code wonderland.
- Figure out the best way to play gifs as textures in Unity, update my interactive comic demo from last May accordingly and to work with interactables... it took longer than I expected just to re-familiarize myself with what I had done.
- Review how to successfully lerp and use coroutines in Unity.
A chaotic popsicle
Excerpt from Emily's Post
This week I worked on creating more visual and animation assets. I drew out some more refined versions of the comic panels, some more sketches, and some key elements for scene 1.
I also devised a very short sample of a cursive writing scene as we will have several of these environments throughout. I worked on After Effects to delete the backgrounds to produce transparent moving elements, however we decided that we may switch technical gears for these scenes, and we might produce them in Quill instead. Either way, here is the short scene I produced: (video originally had black background: now solid is blue to demonstrate transparency). This was great to learn because although it’s not what we will use in the writing scenes, it will most likely be helpful for several of our other elements.
Lillie and I also continued work on time stamps to help out our sound team. We met with them again to discuss sound progress and the new sound references that Lillie and I found. We are pretty excited about the direction that the music and soundtracks are going, and now we need to pivot a little bit to focus on specific diegetic sounds that we will need to either find or produce.
