Meeting and Notes:
We discussed major setbacks and progress each of us had made. one of the scenes in Unity was entirely created and ready to be played and interacted with in VR space. I and Marianna still encountered issues with our rig and import/ Export issues in unity that we wish to develop for next week.
Goals:
.Finalise the rig
.Resolve any further issues that prevent animation
Speech Bubble Explortation
Exploring the ways in which the comic bubbles could be interpreted and translated into 3D space, I wanted to think about player interactivity as well as aesthetic considerations that empathises gameplay. Looking at design elements in balance with gameplay elements, the VR team intend to create interactable speech bubbles, that a player can grab and use as potential weaponry against the seagulls. Thinking about this as a graphic element, my initial ideas were to create one singular mesh that contains both 3D text and a larger almost spherical bubble that the player can grab. Looking at the original false knees comic as a reference, the bubbles are very basic in design and did not inspire much creativity from me inherently apart from the differing line size that added a hand-drawn aesthetic, that I wanted to replicate in 3D.
Below is the initial test I produced to explore speech bubbles’ aesthetics and movement. The test proved mildly unsuccessful despite the 3d environment as I felt the bubbles’ appearance was still flat, going forward from this I looked at references of different artistic impressions of speech bubbles in old animated films and games to see different design aspects I could interpret into 3D space.
One particular design that stood out to me is the credit sequence of One Hundred and One Dalmations (Geronimi, C, Luske, H and W Reitherman, 1961) as I found the abstract outlines and shapes were an interesting format that replicated the spots on the dogs. Taking this animalistic concept into account, I thought that this may be an interesting concept to explore with the seagulls. The key element I took from this however was the thick abstract lines and shapes with more human-made, rough edges that do not appear as perfect as my initial bubble.
Developing from this I created a speech bubble that has several different layers that can be interacted with the intention of creating a more 2D effect in 3D space, I added a heavy line replicating that of traditional comic book line art. With the use of the pencil curve tool, I was able to create a ‘drawn’ and more imperfect aspect to the line control which seemed, in my opinion, to fit with the comedic and comic derived goal of the production.
Below I recorded and shared this process with my team members so that the style and process of the speech bubble developed were easily accessible and could be recreated in the same style to keep consistency with our animations. This process also allowed me to explore different methods of NURBS to polygonal conversion within Maya.
Critically thinking about the process of integrating these bubbles into an interactive and three-dimensional space, there may be some impracticalities in the design aspect as the layered spaced elements of the design could not work well in a 360-degree environment in which all angles of our objects can be explored by players, so this in itself presents challenges on camera and object tracking within the virtual camera. Taking accessibility into account also, we wanted to pick a font that would be easily readable for viewers that may not be able to hear or easily understand the audio and voice acting of the birds, so we explored a style that was simple to read and well-spaced out, but also fitted the ‘hand drawn’ visual to match that of the created 3D lines.
Video References
(49) How to convert/change curve into a polygon in Maya 2020 for beginner – YouTube
Mesh Collision Issues
Expanding on last week’s issues involving missing mesh faces upon unity imports, in an attempt to explore the issues surrounding the deleted faces, I looked at the original Maya file model in an unsmoothed mode to replicate that of its appearance in Unity. I found that the vertex seemed to unnaturally collide with one another and adjusted them so that they were more in line with one another, in the hopes that upon import they would not collide.
The method eventually proved effective however caused a few issues in which the wing looked abnormally big and messed up the overall volume and scale of the model proportionally. This, naturally, takes away from any sense of ‘realism’ we may have wanted to achieve within character believability, however, temporarily seems to fix any issues regarding mesh collision elements.
Scene File setups and professionalism
Now that the rigs are in a functioning state and are ready to be animated I thought it imperative for production to set up a scene in both me and Mariana can use as a base for our animations so they are scaled exactly the same and are both in the exact same spacial position. This will improve the production pipeline as when coding the different interactions into the Unity project folder, the character will not drastically jump apart from one another which will prevent any jarring cuts between character and gameplay interactability.