Visichunk: aggregates of visual input
Editing a bunch of Red footage today. Sadly, my hardware has met its match. The process of converting 5K, HDR to 1080p is abysmally long and all three machines running the conversion is heating up the office like crazy. Starting the sound bed edit on the laptop while the other machines whir and click and voom behind me.
After ten weeks of some pretty massive crunch time, we’ve finally released “2-Bit Bub“, a platformer game I art directed with GRL Games and a bunch of other very talented and amazing artists and programmers:
Game Design and Programming: Graeme Devine
Programming: Paul Reynolds
Programming: Alan Gray
Art Direction / Technical Art: Spencer Lindsay
UI Artist / 2D Artist: Mike Berg
3D Artist / Animator: Liem Nguyen
Fluffy and Eager Intern: Oliver Davies
Our HOLYGODYOU’REAMAZING clients at W+K were:
Compassionate Captain Ahab: Ann-Marie Harbour
Exhausted and Mighty UI Designer: Michelle Childs
Our concept, which I think came out pretty well, was to incorporate plates from the movie which we got from Laika as well as footage we shot up in Portland at their studio. By mapping the images onto planes and low-polygon models, and keeping the camera locked in one axis, we were able to pull off a series of pretty convincing environments that both leveraged the awesome artistry of the teams at Laika and kept the polygon count low enough to move fast on mobile.
We used Paper on the iPad for a lot of the concept sketching.
If you’re interested in how we made all this happen, this is a rough outline of the art path from 3DS Max, into Maya, and then into Unity3D:
Getting really close now, this weekend will be the final tuning and then we go for install the next week.
After many hours of geekery, we came up with a pretty good example of a jellyfish. Plenty of work to do still on shaders, adding mouth arms, textures, etc. But I think we’re getting really close with the fluid motion of the tentacles.
Do me a favor? Tell me which one you like better in the comments. That would totally help me.
Thanks!
Archetype. How did I not see this yet?
I’d love to see this get made into a movie.
I left out a really important portion of the team that built the Touch Wall at the Monterey Bay Aquarium in my previous post about it: The guys who made the incredible hardware our cool app runs on: Ideum
Jim Spadaccini, who runs Ideum, was one of the founders of the Exploratorium up in San Francisco and has a four part blog post about how they manufactured this beast from scratch. If you’re interested in multitouch on a large scale or are just a geek, you’ll find it pretty cool.
EDIT: The UnityPackage for all this madness is here. (If you aren’t familiar with what a .unitypackage is, don’t bother)
Next project has to do with Jellyfish for a client and we’ve bitten off quite a large chunk. Not a chunk that is un-biteable mind you, use a rather large bite.
This is what we’re trying to do in realtime:
In attempting to create a realistic movement in realtime that responds with the appropriate “feel” to visitor input, I started looking on line for examples of fluid motion in Unity 3D. The Skinned Cloth component is great for dresses and cloaks, but after several hours of messing with it, I couldn’t come up with a really nice fluid motion.
After then messing around with the Interactive Cloth component for a few hours, I realized that I was going to approach it from another direction. A buddy of mine from the Atari days suggested I check out this video (around 0:40) from Unite 11, which actually got me on the track I’m on now.
Starting with some bone objects and attaching rigid body and hinge components, I’ve been able to create a super low-res jelly. The problem I’m running into right now is that as I copy and then rotate the “arm” chain around, the physics start drifting after a minute or so which eventually causes the jelly to lock up. It’s the “Sea of Dead Jellies” exhibit! No.
What I’ve got so far (you’ll need the plugin):
VFX? Check
Green Energy? Check
Excellent Mustaches? Check
I really love the two saluting ones.
So we finally finished the “making of” video for the last project Paul and I completed for the Aquarium. I think it turned out pretty well.
