Collaborative Project Submission Post

Completed Gameplay Capture

Finalising all the work completed with the MA VR team in the week prior, we were able to produce a 5-minute long virtual reality experience from a comic book adaptation. Wit interactions are heavily inspired and directly referenced from In the works of Joshua Barkman (False Knees) the experience places the player as a seagull and the actons of unravelling between two seagulls and their day at the seaside. Going through these scenarios, different interactions such as an ice cream collecting mini-game, throwing beachballs and hitting seagulls with sticks add interactional applications for the player. Due to the immersive and in-depth experience players are affronted within the virtual reality space, It felt important that sound was integrated in an effective way, therefore the bird’s interactivity with the sound to bring its presence felt important to player engagement. Below is the final five-minute gameplay capture, displaying these features.

Final Gameplay Capture

Final Gameplay capture with commentary from VR Students

The below video includes the gameplay capture featured with VR commentary to outline with more clarity the interactions and gameplay feature the player can get involved with.

Critically reflecting on the project, as well as my personal participation in it, the limited time span and ambitiousness of the project and the number of scenes that required animating created quite a few hurdles due to lack of experience. Despite these limitations, we were successful in creating a 5-minute long virtual reality experience that included several interactive elements that the player could engage with. While two out of three of these environments were completed, the last city environment proved to have too many elements that required additional work we didn’t factor into our timeline due to technical issues. Reflecting on my own personal engagement with the project, while I was able to help with early development including storyboarding, conceptual art and modelling I felt that my animations could be pushed to a higher quality in a similar light to those I created the last term. Due to several importing/exporting issues that occurred between Maya and Unity as well as reoccurring issues with the rig, the time spent animating was severely limited due to the initial plan. Due to polygon loss during the exporting process, a lot of the expression and motion in the Maya scene was lost when placed into Unity. The animation itself was also stripped from detail due to rigging issues and last minute directional changes, forcing myself and my team members to focus on meeting our deadline whilst sacrificing nuanced quality. However, taking into consideration stylization the minimal amount of animation and lack of realistic detail adds to character design and comedic effect.

Showreel Of Participation

Below is a showreel to display some of the work I produced during the length of the project, taking some of my reflection into consideration the areas that needed more development were my asset modelling and character animation as I feel these both suffered a lack of quality due to time constraints. To improve my asset modelling I would take more time with texturing as I felt some of the textures and detail did not match the overall world they were imported into. Initially, I explored using software called Nomad (an iOS application) it caused some exportation issues between both Maya and Nomad, this also drastically raised the number of polygons which would be inefficient to put into a Unity scene and would cause issues with real-time rendering overload. A process to help retain polygon quality onto a low poly model can be done by implementing the use of a ‘Normal Map’ which is “a special type of texture that tells the 3D program or game engine to display details on a polygon surface as though they were geometry” (Totten, 2012, p.106). When working with game engines in the future, I fully intend to administer this into my modelling work. In Nomad I was creating realistic textures whilst contradicting the textures being used in the False Knees game file which were very minimal and cell-shaded in style.

Miro Board

Cal from VR kept a record of each group meeting held and what was discussed as well as resolved during each week:

Meeting Notes (Collaborative Unity) – Google Docs

Throughout the entirety of the project, we were able to communicate and convey our progress and ideas very visually to one another through the use of the miro board below. This proved to be particularly useful during all group meetings and helped convey ideas very efficiently during class presentations. Below is the completed Miroboard.

https://miro.com/app/board/uXjVOTsXnB8=/?invite_link_id=965546776052

Future research areas to improve and engage with Games engine relationship to computer animation-

.Blackman, S. 2011. Beginning 3d game development with Unity: the world’s most widely used multi-platform game engine. Apress.

. Penny de, B. 2012. Holistic game development with Unity: an all-in-one guide to implementing game mechanics, art, design, and programming. Waltham, MA: Focal Press.

.Botz-Bornstein, T. 2015. Virtual Reality. Leiden: BRILL.

.Cotton.M. 2021. Virtual Reality, empathy and ethics. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.

.Ryan, M, L.2003. Narrative as Virtual Reality: Immersion and Interactivity in literature and electronic media.

Collaborative Blog Posts

Module Introduction: Collaborative Unit: Initial Considerations – Esme’s Blog (arts.ac.uk)

Module Introduction: Collaborative Project: Idea and Skill Pitch – Esme’s Blog (arts.ac.uk)

Workshop: Camera Sequencer – Esme’s Blog (arts.ac.UK)

Collaborative Seminar 1:Collaborative Seminar – Esme’s Blog (arts.ac.uk)

Collaborative Seminar 2:Workshop: Group Seminar – Esme’s Blog (arts.ac.uk)

Week 1: Collaborative Project – Esme’s Blog (arts.ac.uk)

Week 2: Collaborative Project – Esme’s Blog (arts.ac.uk)

Week 3: Collaborative Project – Esme’s Blog (arts.ac.uk)