AR Week 1

When I was an undergrad back at Rochester Institute of Technology study 3D digital design I had a pretty ambitious thesis planned out. The thing was that it took a lot of time, more than I ever spent on a project since I had to learn and figure things out at the same time.

This is when I decided that during my last semester I would not sleep on Wednesdays! To top this off, when there were 10 days left until the final presentation which was on graduation day, I believe I slept an average of about 2-4 hours per night fueled with the help of energy drinks and a jar of peanut butter. The result was myself falling asleep during my graduation ceremony in my chair.

So I started out with a really rough storyboard just to get my idea across. I then realized that my 2D drawing abilities had greatly deteriorated.

I decided to do the assembly of my project in Unreal Engine, I collected a bunch of free assets from the marketplace and extracted some from other projects. I figured the overall look of the project would look nicer as well as be easier to organize using UE4.

Picking through a bunch of the asset packs I collected, I opened up a house level and started plopping in the assets I needed to populate my old college bedroom.

I went to mixamo and found the closest avatar that looked like me, strangely this one worked out perfectly with the glasses, hair, and hoodie choice.

I had to do a little bit of tweaking for some of the poses rotating some of the joints in the editor.

One of the defining things I remembered was having a nice collection of energy drinks at my desk so I googled for a free model of one and found this beauty.

After placing all the objects in a room I modified with new walls, and shorter ceiling and a window, I placed some lights around the scene.

I played around with some of the camera angles, used my storyboard for some inspiration and found some nice ones.

For the final scene, I brought my avatar into Maya to edit him a bit to get him ready for graduation.

I quickly made a hat, extruded a gown out for him, and deleted some of the extra pieces.

Trying to work as effiecently as possible I just made a couple duplicates of my guy and used a close up angle.