Posting early because I’m aiming for a few days of “deep
focus” at the end of this week.
This will be a combined week 9 and week 10 post, since I
missed the last one due to illness. On week 9 I finished production in
Arequipa, Peru. I got lots of solid footage, and the family that hosted me was
gracious and very willing to work with me and show me around. Then, the post
production sickness got me. My body managed to stay healthy through four weeks
of a hectic schedule, but as soon as I was done in Arequipa, I got it all at
the same time-- you name it and I probably had it as a symptom. (Do not worry,
I am 100% now.)
This week I’m coordinating with the folks that are helping
me recreate some 3D spaces. I “scanned” rooms by takings 1,000s of pictures
using a GH4. These pictures are then “stitched” using the software
RealityCapture. (If anyone is interested in photogrammetry, I’m happy to share
some notes). (If anyone is a PRO with photogrammetry, please give me your notes,
or let me pick your brain!)
The 3D scanning is more experimental for me, whereas 360-video
is my bread and butter. This week I had to fix some earlier stitches from
Kolor’s APV that didn’t look too good. I used the new software MistikaVR.
HIGHLY recommend it. Super easy to learn and the results are great thanks to
the optical flow feature. It can also be used to stitch Gear360 footage, for
anyone that may be having trouble with the Gear Director software.
Two weeks left! Woah, classic 2017. Looking forward to
getting a test build ready by the end of next week, so I can spend the last
week fine tuning the little details.
Also posting early for same reason - deep focus over w/e to do a wrap.
The story of Billy Wu (Red Flute) continues into scene 4 where he/player drinks the broth of oblivion. Modeled an ancient Chinese cauldron and hid it inside the four-face Buddha. Had to retopologize a statue of this Buddha (million polygons) into a mesh (14K polys now) that I could cut and animate. The four faces of the Buddha rotate in the scene, opening up a hidden cavern. This is where the player finds the bubbling soup (Five Flowers) and smoking censers. In order to open up the Buddha, the player has to find and store 5 flowers.
Retopologizing the Four-Face Buddha:
Originally came to NYC on scholarship with the Joffrey Ballet (as a kid) and can't seem to break away from theatre or dance. The piece is evolving only to become more theatrical - using old-fashioned staging techniques to shape 3D space. Love the combo of theatre, storytelling, dance and game. What was the Meng Po character is now a group of demon dancers protecting the Buddha. As soon as the player achieves the goal of 5 picked flowers, these demons melt into a sleep and the altar is revealed. The player can then go inside the Buddha to drink the soup.
Dancing warrior demons on the edge of Hell:
Echoing Alvaro (similar schedule), I intend to fine-tune and test the four scenes over the next 2 weeks.
Wishing everyone a wonderful (albeit intense) trip to the finish line!!
The story of Billy Wu (Red Flute) continues into scene 4 where he/player drinks the broth of oblivion. Modeled an ancient Chinese cauldron and hid it inside the four-face Buddha. Had to retopologize a statue of this Buddha (million polygons) into a mesh (14K polys now) that I could cut and animate. The four faces of the Buddha rotate in the scene, opening up a hidden cavern. This is where the player finds the bubbling soup (Five Flowers) and smoking censers. In order to open up the Buddha, the player has to find and store 5 flowers.
Retopologizing the Four-Face Buddha:
Originally came to NYC on scholarship with the Joffrey Ballet (as a kid) and can't seem to break away from theatre or dance. The piece is evolving only to become more theatrical - using old-fashioned staging techniques to shape 3D space. Love the combo of theatre, storytelling, dance and game. What was the Meng Po character is now a group of demon dancers protecting the Buddha. As soon as the player achieves the goal of 5 picked flowers, these demons melt into a sleep and the altar is revealed. The player can then go inside the Buddha to drink the soup.
Dancing warrior demons on the edge of Hell:
Echoing Alvaro (similar schedule), I intend to fine-tune and test the four scenes over the next 2 weeks.
Wishing everyone a wonderful (albeit intense) trip to the finish line!!
Week 10 OLP blogpost
Worked with a developer - Eric Nevala at yoyostring creations in seattle. Eric likes to work in Unreal. I was nervous about this at 1st, but given that he had 17 years experience as a programmer, and has his own VR game (wizards throwing fireballs at zombies!), and he had free time on his schedule, I decided to just trust that Unreal was the way to go.
And, OMG, I am super glad I made that call. Since I have only played around with Unity 3x in my life, I was really nervous about attempting to do this part of the project myself. Ebony made me feel a little more at ease during last week’s call when she said that submitting meant that maybe you could take a project manager role if you weren’t so skilled at the technical stuff. So that’s what I did! I focused on communicating what I needed clearly to Eric, creating the best possible assets from what we shot, and learning from him as he worked through creating the blueprint.
His initial estimate to get it done was 1 day. That stretched to 2.5, mainly because I forgot to format my drive for PC, and there was some time lost transferring assets. We also tried playing the text bubbles as videos - but that meant Unreal was trying to play 3 videos at once and that brought the frame rate way down. So, we just included the graphics in the single video asset, and he created invisible colliders over the graphics. The UI only pops up during the selection scene.
I am pretty happy with it as a proof of concept. There are some bugs - at the end of one selection another pops up for 1.5 seconds. And there was an erroneous phone buzz cue in the wrong scene - but I think we proved the possibility of the choose your own adventure pretty well.
And, I think the fact that the choice comes through text bubbles - something familiar to everyone, doesn’t take the viewer out of the story.
Eric suggested I do a flowchart for him to help him understand the full scope of the project, if funded. Sharing that below, and some of our “work” pictures. He worked - I shopped for PC’s 🙂
Tifa
