"More Than Meets The Eye" Animated VR Experience

Reworking some of the earlier scenes, as the element that will unite all three worlds is the spawn camera. This is one continuous camera that will be animated across all three environments. Meaning that I will need to re-animate the camera in Aaron's world, so the view will move seamlessly from Sally's world to Aaron's. The camera capabilities at the moment do not allow for views to jump from one camera to another. I've duplicated the tube train, so that there is a moving train that arrives at the platform, then a duplicate static train, without transform keys, has been nested into the animated spawn camera group. This means that the tube train moves exactly with the camera, giving the viewing the illusion of being on the train. This is a much more efficient and accurate method, compared to my original method of creating matching view finders. I've reanimated the passenger figures today too. Using the anim brush each character was drawn across a series of frames. ...

 I've been immersed in thesis writing for the past few weeks, as my computer graphics card could not work with the demand from Quill and Quest. Now up to approx 57,000 words and my new computer is up and running. The Piccadilly Circus environment was too heavy, too detailed and the composition was lacking in anything dynamic. This week, after a supervisory meeting, I decided to deconstruct Aaron's environment, much like throwing toy building blocks randomly around a living room and repositioned them. Keeping the spawn camera animations as they were, this gave a fresh new perspective. As a result, creativity was unleashed, the buildings are simplified and a new curved roadway is in place. I've imported the backdrop from Sally's world, so there is cohesion between the two worlds. Keeping an eye on memory, polygon counts and draw calls too. Screen shot below of the new layout. I am going to use an aerial shot of Piccadilly Circus, when we move into David's world and he...

I've decided to shuffle the soundtrack clips, so that we emerge from the underground immediately into Piccadilly Circus.  I've spent today roughing in the building positions, to establish what set pieces to build and what I don't need to include. As upload to the Quest requires a maximum draw call of 65 at any given time in the scene and 1.2 million polygons, anything I can do to cheat the look and avoid unnecessary geometry is vital. Screen grabs below show rough buildings drawn with the ribbon brush, reference photos taken from google maps, plus a screen shot taken directly from the google maps to get the layout of buildings.

The majority of Sally's world in the VR experience is, other than a few glitches and some animation for walking legs, complete. The ideas for David's world leading straight from Sally's world didn't seem to flow, or be as dramatic as I hoped. My training insists on leaving ideas alone if they're not working and to turn my attention to something else. In this case I've started working on Piccadilly Circus and I'm considering an escalator rising up from Sally's world and arriving near the statue of Eros. Roughed out the world layout, cheating and 'dressing to camera' - meaning, much like a real live action set, the buildings are simply facades and placed in position to work best with the camera view. I wanted a sky rather than a background and found a tutorial on how to paint an equirectangular image in photoshop. First time using 3D layers in photoshop and painting a skybox. Screen grabs below of progress...

Getting to grips with animating spawn areas, using stepped interpolation. Meaning, camera angles that jump abruptly from one view to another. Sally's world is becoming defined and I've animated a tube train, using transform keys, to arrive on the platform. Screen shots below showing the spawn area (camera view) indicated by a view finder and cross hair. Although the viewer will be able to look in a 360 degree direction, by targeting the camera view in the direction of the action, the viewer will be lead through the narrative.

 I created simple commuter shapes in Quill today. What would have taken weeks in Maya has taken a few hours. Using the wire frame, I created figures and placed them in a group. The group then has opacity keyframes to fade the group in and out, whilst Sally talks about them being anonymous and she drew their feet, so as not to be intrusive....

 Straight ahead animation in Quill - commuter's feet on the underground.

 Using straight ahead animation (meaning literally drawing continuously and sequentially ahead from the first frame, without setting key poses) to represent Sally talking about drawing people's feet.

 Walk cycle tests, using a model created in Quill. Although Sally talks only of drawing legs, I wanted to create a model that I could then draw legs over. Drawing the whole figure enables me to create a rise and fall with the walk cycle, so that the legs will also give the impression of being connected to an entire body

 Today's challenge, to create a rough walk cycle in Quill. Getting familiar with the timeline controls and inserting and duplicating frames. I used a reference image to draw key poses and in-betweens.  This is currently on single frames, tomorrow I will duplicate each frame, to create the animation on 'twos' meaning the image holds for two frames rather than one. The playback frame rate is 24 frames per second - but on the rift it's about 70 and the quest it's 90! This is the rough looping walk cycle, currently on ones and way too fast. Also the animation needs refining. But good to get to grips with how to create a simple figure and to make it walk (or appear to hurry for a train!).

 This week's task - animating a walk cycle in Quill... First step (!) tutorials...