Team Progress
Audio progress this week: THE RECORDING IS ALL DONE & THE SONGS ARE ALL WRITTEN!!! In an *unprecedented* logistical pandemic feat, we got everyone to either send us decently high quality files recorded at home, or come into ATLAS to record their lines. Phu and Xavier have been working hard to record some absolutely beautiful original music for us. Emily has been busy cutting the recordings together to prepare them for Xavier to master, and I've been busy figuring out how we'll need to format the audio files to get them into the game engine.
Animation progress this week: Emily and I have been working nonstop to figure out how to format and export all of our different types of animations to make them work with the game engine. It has been a grueling process but we're so close! She's also made a lot of progress on the production of our final art for scenes 1, 2, 4 and 5!
Technical progress this week: I did a lot of research and made a lot of terrifying cryptic diagrams, and eventually figured out how to write the code that will control the timing and playthrough of our scenes! This might sound underwhelming, but it's a HUGE breakthrough for me! Between this and my interactions progress from last week, I finally have the conceptual framework I need to write every script in the entire project. More below!
An Uphill Battle
I spent most of this week telling my teammates that their cool ideas wouldn't work. Emily and I have had probably a hundred variations on this conversation:
Emily: hey I figured out this really great approach to an animation-- let's put it in Unity!
Me: seems like that won't work in Unity-- can you try exporting it in this format?
Emily: ...if I export it in that format it won't animate correctly anymore.
Me: ok well what if you did it in this other way?
Emily: that would take like three weeks of nonstop work to do...
Both of us: .......bUt wE oNlY hAvE THREE WEEKS LEFT?!?!
However, we are slowly but surely figuring it out. We have developed multiple workflows for different animations including the Blender grease pencil, Blender's 3D modeling tools, Procreate, AfterEffects, and Quill. Here's a video that I made demonstrating two interactive scenes in VR.
And another that Emily put together, not in VR but with final art!
And to demo more of the audio work we've done this week, an un-mastered soundtrack for our scenes 4, 5, 6, and 7.
My Progress
On my end-- It is no small feat to coordinate the many animations, audio clips, videos, 3D models, and other assorted assets that will need to show up at precisely the right times in Unity and coordinate with our interactive sections. However, I think I have finally cracked the code (with a lot of help from Matt and David!) Here's a gallery of images that I put together which walk through my process of making a scene manager for the matchbox scene. I still haven't finished the code, but it's getting close.
I needed to draw out a diagram of which events in the scene were connected and when they all took place.
From there, I made a list of outstanding technical questions and made a very rough outline of the manager script.
Psuedocode
A portion of the mostly working code
Excerpt from Emily's post
This week I focused on the technical processes of how I’ll be exporting animations to exist in the VR sphere. I worked on familiarizing myself with Blender’s Greasepencil tool, especially the build modifier. If we are able to export the specific individual assets, we may be able to put the greasepencil drawings directly into Unity. This is something we were not totally sure how we’d tackle so it feels good to make progress on the logistical side of things. Here is a new sample of how the handwriting might look in 3d: my tablet is slightly laggy making the cursive slightly choppy, and I’m not sure if the speed of the cursive is distracting or if it should be word by word coming in at different times (next word starts coming in as previous word finishes up). Definitely something to explore before final renders.
I also made a prototype of a flame to explore frame-by-frame animation in Greasepencil as well as the glowing visual effect.
I also worked on tracing drawings and importing them as SVGs into Blender so that we have concrete 3d objects to work with.
