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Author: Sohum Sharma
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Maya critical appraisal
I knew that this project was more on the creative side, so naturally I thought it would be slightly more challenging since it would require to come up with something unique and new. When I had first designed my character, I did think that it was a unique character, but I wasn’t able to sketch it out properly so I ended up scratching that idea. I ended up with a military fox, which even though was an original idea, it ended up resembling the fox from Zootopia quite significantly which I fund quite annoying but since the sketch I had drawn out was so perfect, I decided to stick to it no mater what the haters said. Physically creating the character physically out of wires, foil and clay was probably the most fun part of the entire process. Using photogrammetry, I ended up with a digital model of my character which I then put in maya and used quad draw to retopologies it. We were finally put into the motion capturing suits that we had been hearing about for a couple of weeks. The replications of my movements done by the humanoid on screen were uncanny. I felt like a child who had been given access to the greatest toy that had ever existed, I was enjoying myself way too much. Despite being presented with the opportunity to wear the mocap suit, I was in the early stages of my character and had not finalised what I wanted my movements to be so I ended up wasting the one opportunity I had because little did I know that I would fall extremely sick for the next few weeks and miss the other mocap sessions. By the time I had recovered, the second and third years had become busy with the room so the only option I was left with to record my animation, was to shoot a video with a device and create an animation using the Rokoko app like we had been taught in the first mocap lesson. After spending various hours recording in various locations, I found the perfect location on an abandoned park. After putting the video in Rokoko and exporting it and putting it into Maya, I had to proceeds to work on the most annoying, exhilarating and tedious process of this entire project, the character rigging. Its basically where you give your character a skeleton and make sure all the joints are perfectly assigned so there’s no weird movements. The next step which was to skin the skeleton to the character so that when you move the skeleton, the character moves with it, was taking a toll on my mental health and patience because Maya simply refused to skin and repeatedly showed the same error which had no fix or solution that I could find online. After taking help from my classmate to fix that issue, I configured the animation from Rokoko onto my character. I finally gave the character some texturing, created a simple forest scene in unity and exported the ready animation to finally finish my project in record time. In its entirety, I would say that despite the various challenges I faced, the various methods used, animations wasted, I was just glad that I was able to have an animation which did not include the character putting his own arm through his head. When it comes to my satisfaction, for this project specifically, I felt like I did the bare minimum and was just desperate to finish it and I think that was visible in my project. Therefore, I was only moderately happy with what I had come up with, because I knew the potential it had but I was unable to fully display the vision I had in my head, but having said that, I do think that I managed to grasp the basics of creating an animated character with an animation recorded by myself and make the character copy what I did. I leaned how to digitally recreate a physical object, how to use rigging and animation in maya and got to try on the mocap suit and experimented with it. I know that it’s not right to blame it on an excuse, but I strongly believe that the reason my project was done so hastily was because I ran out of time as I lost crucial weeks right before the deadline being sick, which I had planned to spend working on the project instead. It was just unfortunate timing but again that could have been solved if I was a little ahead and when I had put on the mocap suit for the first time, if I was prepared with my animations then, I would have saved quite a lot of time. It just shows that like always, my procrastination got the better of me, and even though this time I had in fact planned out my project a few weeks before, I became unwell for that exact time period that it almost felt like a curse. That being said, I managed to push my creativity and technical boundaries, overcame all the problems I faced and came up with a decent result. Looking forward, I am excited about the potential implementation of these skills in future ambitious projects. As the years go by, I hope to hone my skills even further, incorporate new technologies and produce a well-developed and refined project. Seeing how at the beginning of this year I had no idea what a complicated software like Maya even was, to completing an entire animated project which included two such engines, I have come a long way and am proud of myself. Can only gain more experience from here onwards.
This essay was a rollercoaster. I won’t lie, there were some serious hardships along the way that tested my patience and sanity. I would have never thought that exploring the depths of empathy in a virtual world could be so challenging.
There were a lot of components and steps to this essay, some of which I did not enjoy. Something as simple as whittling down how broad your essay topic actually was, was the one thing that I found the most difficult. The topic I had in mind was such that my brain was being unable to generate a title for my essay. Once I figured it out, I was overjoyed, and although it seems like an exaggeration, it was the one thing that was blocking me from progressing any further since I wouldnt be sure what I was writing about until my topic was finalised. Researching took most of my time. Hours of looking at the same websites, academic papers, putting the same keywords in the search bar hoping something useful pops up, this essay was testing me beyond any limits, but I pressed on. The drive to finish an essay this long for the first time became my core focus point and source of motivation.
I scrolled through articles, papers, e-books, anything to give me glimmer of hope that my topic, empathy in VR: How does the Role of Presence Create Understanding and Compassion, was good enough to have enough content available about it. Immersing myself in articles, studies, and expert opinions, I wanted to understand the concept of empathy in VR from various perspectives, exploring its potential benefits, drawbacks, etc. The research phase was overwhelming as I was trying to choose the most relevant and credible sources to use in my essay from an unmeasurable amount of resources, I didnt even think my topic could have so many. Once I had all the resources I needed, I drafted several rough versions of the essay. I had many moments of doubt, which was why I had numerous drafts, I was questioning my writing, my arguments and even debated if I shouldve been having water instead of coffee, which was insanity. I have always had a problem with my inner critic, the need to be perfect, its never helpful and yet I cant get rid of that tiny voice in the back of my head pointing something or the other out that is wrong or could be done better in some other way.
I had only heard of writers block, and for the first time while writing this essay, I actually experienced it. I was struggling to find the right words or phrases to convey my ideas effectively. It felt like I was only using quotes said by other people and had no ideas of my own. Trying to write something you thought about compared to writing a well worded quote said by a famous psychologist can be very demotivating, let me tell you that much. It took many hours staring continously at the same Word page screen for something to click and mentally overcome this so-called writers block. I say so-called but it actually made my life miserable. The moment of breakthrough that suddenly hits after you have been sitting in the corner of the room like a ball thinking that you finally have to give in to the essay-writing-gods and use chatGPT, is a thrilling experience. When that happened I remember my finger flew over the keyboard. Once I had a reference point, I knew I could write about it alot, all it took was to just think of it and boderline depression from wondering if I’ll be able to finish and pass the year.
The feeling of accomplishment felt after completing the essay was unparalleled. The hours of research, contemplation and hardwork, the numerous cups of coffee, all combined together to help me finish a task I had never tackled before. I had chosen a topic, delved deep into its specifics and had emerged on the other side with a deeper understanding of it and greater confidence. I understood that it was just a matter of finding the right topic and that everything else just falls into place once you have that, its simple from there onwards, not taking into account the low moments of despair ofcourse. It was a fulfilling task completed to the best of my abilities. I definitely feel more confident in writing essays now, knowing the steps and procedures that need to be taken in order to accomplish it, including a trip to Lidl for huge batches of coffee and can say with surity that my ‘I-cant-write-essays-more-than-500-words’ disease has officially vanished.
When we got this assignment, my initial thoughts were something along the lines of “well damn that sounds like a lot of work”. I have never written an essay as long as this one despite going to a english focussed school for my entire student life. We just never wrote essays like this, the maximum number of words we were asked to write was 500 and that too on topics such as short stories.
I eventually started thinking about essay topics and what could my 500-word-essay brain come up with. In one of the lectures, our course leader, David, mentioned Mel Slater who questioned how it was possible to create vr environments such that people responded realistically and what was the psychological reason behind it. After an hour of research, I came across this websit https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2781884/. Even though it was a promising topic, I could already hear David go, “I think the topic is too broad’ resulting in me doing further research anyway so I tried to steer away from it but somehow ended up going to a similiar direction though, and thought about doing it on Virtual reality’s effects on social empathy and behaviour. It was my first actual topic and the essay was starting to form. Ofcourse it wasn’t that easy, I had definitely thought that my topic was focussed enough, it only talked about two paticular things, and I was wrong but that was revealed later. Initially happy with my topic, I started my research slowly and spent about an hour a day. It’s things like these that result in me doing everything last minute.
The first resourse I found was a book called the Social Handbook of Psychology in the form of a pdf because who would actually buy a book. I couldnt find it on the uni library website too. I was sure I had hit the jackpot but also knew I needed atleast 5 resources in total. I read a few pages of the book mentioning social psychology and how its applied and affected in VR and I was ecstatic. It talked about presence in VR and how that is the basic factor that affects everything related to psychology of the human mind. I started writing. What I didnt realise was that my essay had begun to gravitate specifically towards the idea of presence when I had to talk about socia empathy and behaviour.
I researched more and the more journals and articles I’d found, I realised they all mentioned the effects of presence
After writing my first draft, which was a mere 500 words, my capacity, I showed it to David and here was when it was revealed that the topic infact was still not focussed enough. He advised me to dive deeper into the topic of presence. That evening, I sat for 4 hours straight and found around 8 resouces talking about presence in VR. I still wanted to stick to my original idea of empathy as psychology was something I was always interested in. Its probably in the family, seeing that both my parents are life coaches. The idea to induce empathy in VR and how the different levels of presence in VR changed the result of the experience, intrigued me. Thus formed my essay topic, Empathy in Virtual reality: How does the role of presence create understanding and compassion.
Now that my topic was finalised, I started increasing my research hours at home. I came across a few names multiple times, Mel slater and Jeremy Bailenson were two of them. I have used many of their resources. I started researching specifically by using their name and found other people who had worked with them or had worked in a similar area which helped me gather all my resources. ‘
I gathered around 15 resources which I deemed enough for my sense of satisfaction and actually started writing the essay. Some were useful and some weren’t. Starting with an introduction about empathy in VR, I talked about Edward Titchener’s definition and how empathy meant understanding another’s emotions and connecting with them at a deeper level. Then had my literature review on importance of presence and cited as many references as I could, had a duscussion about the pros and cons of using Vr to generate empathy and finally concluded buy talking about VR’s potential for the future. I remember that the more resources I found, the more hopeful I got and the more closer the essay became to its completion. I came across many papers and journals which had no relevance to my topic, but I just sat and read them wasting time like I normally would, but this time, instead of watching a show, I was reading someones work and gaining knowledge, which I found very fascinating because that wouldnt be something I would ever do. One such paper was The Psychology of Art by Lev Semenovich Vygotsky taken from The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism.
The resources I actually used varied from topics such as meta-analysis’ about immersion, empathy enhancement in VR and gaming addiction to name a few.
Looking back at this essay, something that I deemed impossible to do, it actually turned out to be super informative in multiple ways. I learnt about several pioneers of VR, figured out the harvard referenciong sytem everyone went on about and finally, wrote an essay that I couldve only dreamed to write. It may seem as an exaggeration, but I’m not joking. This was a challenging but enlightening experience. Through this process, I gained valuable insights into my topic and developed my research and writing skills. It also taught me the importance of perseverance and discipline, as well as the value of seeking feedback from others and incorporating it into my work. You could say the experience proved to be a valuable opportunity for my growth and development. Never knew something I considered boring like writing an essay could actually turn out to be so much fun but Im glad it did.
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Maya Model Assignment
This assignment was described to us by Kelvin, our teacher, as more of a creative project in which we had to let our imagination run wild. In the first few classes we were taught about character design and the theory behind the shape of the characters and how the industry designs characters in games and movies and the process behind it.
Initial stage
After being briefed on our assignment we were made to design characters off the top of our heads. I came up with some random stuff which included a hybrid of a human and an octopus. After going home and doing research, I realised that a similar creature already existed in mythiology called Cthulhu, so I decided to design new characters sitting at home. I came up with two more but the the second one, even though it was more complicated, it looked cool the way I had designed it so I decided to go with that. It was a fox as a human with human features and and dressed somewhat like how a human would dress.
After designing the character, we had, in my opinion, one of the best classes of uni yet and physically modelled the character using clay and wires and foil. It put my poor clay handeling skills to the test and challenged me to create a character that could stand on its two legs by itself and it wasnt as easy as it sounds. After making a model that had balance and a legs strong enough to stand, we were going to use photogrammetry, scan the physical model and edit it in maya after inputing it in metashape and getting a base model from there.
The reason the model is not fully complete is due to the images not being taken properly and not overlapping each other well enough to create a closed model, so I had to retake the image of the model in my room and put the images in the software again and finally had a full model.
After saving the model made as an obj, I imported it into Maya to work on it from there and needless to say it looked awful at first glance.
Once that was done, we used a tool in Maya called Quadraw and drew over the model in quadrilaterals to give it a better and smoother shape. I naturally messed up my first quadraw attempt and made it too complicated which was pointed out to me by Kelvin that if I re-did it it would have been better for me later to make any changes I wanted
After the second quadraw the model was looking way better in smooth mode which was how were were supposed to work. I realised I had not added ears so I built them on, added a nose, mouth, eyes, eyebrows, nails and changed the way I wanted the body shape to look like till I was happy with it.
The next thing to do was UV mapping, which included cutting, sewing and loads of unfolding of random shaped objects, and even though I tried my best to cut and sew the model into proper objects, some still remained irregular.
Next stage
I had the opportunity to participate in some exciting motion capture (MoCap) sessions. These sessions allowed me to understand how to record videos and upload them to rokoko to creat an animation, but majorly the session I atttended when I wore the suit was basically looking at a 10 year old who had been given a toy, I was ecstatic.
It recorded realistic movements that could be applied to my characters in Maya. Despite being the perfect way to record my animation, at the time I had worn the suit, I had no idea what I wanted my character to do, and I fell sick after that so I missed the other sessions. The timing couldnt have been worse I was quite agitated. After recovering, the mocap room wasnt available any further so that meant I had to record a video on my own. I first needed a script talking about what my character was meant to do. I had gone into this project creating a fox who was going to be a military man, so it was pretty clear to me that I had to make him march and salute among other things.
The above includes the script that I finalised and how the scenes proceeded.
Next I needed a suitable location for my video footage. I spent hours exploring various environments, finding different angles to record from and searching for the perfect place to shoot. I did various takes in my own room, the hallway, and the lobby too.
I had to leave the building and go into a colony area to finally shoot my video.
Despite finding the ideal location, I encountered an unexpected issue. The character’s feet were not being properly rendered and it was casuing my animation to crouch the entire way, causing instability in the motion capture data. something was bound to go wrong eventually. I decided to proceed and work with the best footage I had.
Back in Maya, I realised my character looked quite dull, so I gave him colour and eyes to make him look more realistic. Since my UV mapping was messed up, I created several materials, assigning different colours to them and chose the faces I wanted to colour and did it that way. Uv mapping would have clearly been ideal, since it would have made designing my character much more simpler, but I have realised through experience that nothing goes perfectly in these maya projects.
Once I was happy with how my character looked, I began the process of creating a skeleton and rigging it to my character. This crucial step allowed the character to move realistically and fluidly. However, I faced several challenges during the skinning process due to the same error over and over again.
I spent various hours on youtube, google, even reddit, to find the answer to my problem, but was unsuccessful, the animation had already been imported from rokoko, but I had nothing to attach it to since the my character was not moving with my skeleton and I had pretty much hit a road block where I was unable to procees with my project.
Then came the great lord and saviour, my classmate, Rithwik. Understanding my predicament, he graciously offered his assistance. We spent countless hours on call, troubleshooting and refining the skinning process. His expertise and patience were invaluable, his roomate said that I owed him big time for this and I agree. Through the magic of the universe, he managed to skin my character and suddenly my character was able to move with the skeleton.
once the character was successfully rigged in Maya, it was time to bring it into Unity. Following a simple YouTube tutorial, I created a large field in the middle of a forest. Unity’s extensive variety of tools and features allowed me to construct a visually appealing environment that was simple to make yet convincing.
Ofcourse even though my world was finished, it was not going to be that simple and I encountered yet another obstacle. The animation from Maya was not exporting correctly. Either only the character was getting exporter, or only the animation.
I was unable to import both together even though I followed the settings that were needed while exporting. Since I was going to uni to present on the day of submission, despite the judgement I would get from Kelvin, I knew that the only option was to ask him then and there on how to fix it hoping it was an easy solution since Google was proving to be useless. Well as much hope I had put in kelvin, turns out he’s not that advanced at unity since thats Eric’s department who wasnt there in the morning.
Final stage
I was still optimistic that I’d be able to figure out how to add my character fully. I searched up some more on google and finally was able to export everything perfectly.
The last thing I wanted to do was to add the same animation another time but not the full thing so I did that by copying and pasting the animation once in the animaiton editor and deleted all the key frames that were not required in the second animation.
I was finally done. After feeling like I had been through hell, I had managed to complete my project in its entirety. After presenting, Kelvin asked me which field I saw myself working in and even though I have not decided since Im still exploring, that question has gotten my mind thinking about my future endeavours in VR so I thank him for that.
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WEEK 2
In week 2 we talked about various topics, including the 3 components of VR, which are immersion, presence and interactivity. We talked about various pioneers of VR and one of the people that were mentioned was Mel Slater who worked specifically under VR presence. After being told to do research one a topic talked about in the last 2 weeks as assigned to us by David, I chose to explore the ideals of Mel Slater.
His fascination to find out what makes virtual reality unique as compared to other communication mediums intrigued me. He talks about how VR activates a human’s sensorimotor contingencies in a way which fools our brain and makes us believe that we are being transported into another world and that whatever happens there is real. He broke this entire experience into the Place Illusion and the Plausible Illusion where the place illusion answers the question, ”Am I there?” and the latter answers, ”is this happening?” After reading several articles, many of them seemed to be comparing Slater’s theory with the elemental theory of presence which describes different qualities of embodied presence, social and mental presence, emotional presence and active presence. In an interview article in which is he questioned about the same, Slater says that all the mentioned qualities of experience are not unique to virtual reality. He explains that It is possible to be as emotionally engaged with a book or movie as you can be to a VR experience and therefore this particular theory of the conceptualisation of presence isn’t important to determine whats makes a VR experience unique.
This entire exercise to research a topic was a step closer to figuring out our final topic of research that we will work on,
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Critical Appraisal
Heading into this assignment, my main objective was to produce something I was finally proud of, and despite my final work looking nothing like how I imagined it to be, it was still something I could pridefully look at and say, “I made that.”
Maya is a software that challenged me to my limits when it comes to my skill level and even broke that barrier. In the process of making this world, I learned quite a lot, mainly for example; Maya is hard.
And I dont say that lightly. The way I struggled with my world is something that I failed to express in my presentation in class, but the countless hours spent on my world resulted in satisfying merely a fraction of my expectations.
I originally had a completely different idea compared to what I finally manufactured. After searching through the internet, I stumbled upon an idea of making a Greek/Roman mythological world with ancient architecture and upon further dwelling into that idea, it registered that if I were to make such a world I wanted detailed statues of the Gods which I realised was not possible due to a reason I’ll state simply but harshly, I was just not that good at Maya. I finally ended up thinking of making a floating futuristic city which was supposed to resemble a mix between the city as seen in the movie Tomorrowland and the ambience as resembled in the game Cyberpunk.
I started with the modelling of basic buildings and since they looked way too basic and not at all futuristic, I made them taller to give them a skyscraper look. Once the modelling was done, I found textures on websites like Polyhaven and Poliigon because the main website that Kelvin showed us, textures.com, simply refused to load on my laptop. Once I was satisfied with my texturing on the buildings, I added a skydome after a tiring process of finding the right resolution image online to use. Once that was finished, I created a path and fixed a camera to it and animated it to go through the city and show it from various angles. While rendering, for some reason, the render view only displayed a black screen because due to an incredible feat that I still can’t understand, I forgot to add external lighting. After adding four sources of directional lighting I was finally able to see the world. Once the render was finished, I transfered it to Premiere Pro and exported it as a .MP4 file.
Conclusion
This assignment was a challenge, but I had fun regardless. I must admit I was not fully satisfied with my final product, but I was surely proud of it seeing that it was my first attempt at a newly learnt software. Ofcourse I know there were numerous things that I could’ve done better, like post rendering, the final scene still looked dark. I could’ve added more objects, made it more dense, I felt like I wasted a lot of space on the plane that could have been put to better use. Like Kelvin mentioned, my UV skills could’ve also been better and I couldn’t agree more, my textured buildings looked fine from a single side but were disoriented from the rest of them. Despite being extremely harsh on myself in this analysis, which was exactly what Kelvin advised us not to do, it’s safe to say I met challenges and conquered them and met some more and failed to fix them. At the end of the day, I enjoyed working on this project, as much as it’s important to love the final outcome of your work, it’s also important to love the journey, and I can proudly say that I did, despite having difficulties. The way I see it, that’s what made it exciting. The errors I made along the way made me more eager and desperate to master the software, because I wanted to perfect it. It made me learn new tools, watch videos and showed me the possibilites it provides. I have become more friendly with Maye so I can say I’ve come a long way, and I look forward to work on it soon.
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Maya Project
Ideas
The initial idea I had for the project was to create a mythological setting with a temple and statues of greek gods, but when we were told that everything had to be modelled ourselves, my confidence in that idea fell. I had done some research and found reference before we were told this but those were of no use. i had also found an image of an underwater city but I didnt do that either. That was unfortunate because if I couldve pulled it off it wouldve looked cool.
The final idea ended up being behind the idea of a futuristic floating city. The idea popped in my head as my previous work revolved around creating a filter of a futuristic looking robot and the whole future theme, so I ended up creating a floating city. Going into this assignment, I somehow knew that what i’ll finally make would be nowhere near to what I was imagining and even though the final product did not turn out as I had pictured it in my head, I am proud of it and take it as a learning to work on my skills and techniques to familiarise myself with the softwaren so by next term I become more advanced at it.
Basic Modeling
To start my world, I created the base of my floating city and then started adding differently shaped buildings into it. The inspiration of these buildings came from the top of my head, except the avengers tower that was very obviously from the Avengers movie. Being a huge Marvel fan, when you think about futuristic looking skyscrapers,
Texturing
once the modeling was done I moved on to texturing. There are various websites that can be used to find textures and one of the most used one that was also used in class is Textures.com. For some reason when I opened up the website, it refused to load, all I could see was a blank dark blue screen. I restarted my wifi in hopes that it was a connection issue but when that didnt fix it I ended up restarting my laptop. Sadly, even after fully reviving my laptop, the website was stubborn enough to not open so I started looking for alternatives. That was when I came across sketchuptextureclub.com. It was a life saver, It had all the materials and textures I wanted. I also tried out poliigon textures but those were of no use.
After finding the required textures, I applied them to my buildings and the base.
I also created a fountain after watching a 2 part youtube tutorial that did not fit in the overall scene of the world but I was proud of it so I kept it. I then added textures to that as well and used the ocean shader to make the water more realistic.
After finishing all the texturing of the buildings and the base, this was what it finally looked like.
Animation
For the animation part, I added a camera going through the entire world by tracing out a path for it to travel on
Lighting and Rendering
as you can see from the above image, I added a sky dome depicting starry space so it looked like a floating world. The hunt for HDRIs was not a fun one. I had to trial and error around 10 HDRIs before I was finally satisfied with one.
For some weird reason, when I rendered my world it was showing just a black screen
And then I realised that I forgot to add external lighting
After rendering the entire scene and filling my storage with pngs, I headed over to Premiere Pro to create the final video
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360 Film
Augmented Reality
Virtual World
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Character Biography
The future is a place ahead of time with incredibly advanced technology, hoverboards and a dystopia where everything is digital. The Spark AR character is a representation of a person from this same time who is half human, half robot, runs on battery and lives in Cybertron, a utopia set in the year 3000.
The thought process behind my character was fairly simple. The virtual world I always imagined to build was a futuristic one similar to the movie Tomorrowland. It was clear to me that the character needed to have a halo and an LED display in front of it’s eyes. I found an image on Google and thought it was the perfect depiction of the character I had in mind. It finally ended up having a halo on top of its head, a display lens over its eyes, a charging port on its forehead as it was part android and I added a blue reflecting filter over the face since I imagined the natural light in the world to be blue as if mabye everyone lived in a dome. I dont know what it was about the colour blue but it gave everything a futuristic effect.
The character is an android and has a genetically modified face and body and therefore is not represented by my physical self. The character is not me, the design is meant to be one of the more privileged people living in Cybertron who has the Halo on their head. The Halo is not an easy object to acquire in Cybertron, it requires extreme display of skill and sacrifice to be rewarded to someone who receives it personally from the Overlord. I call these people the Watchers. Since the image of the way the Overlord looked, was not clear in my mind, I designed the next powerful person using the software, a Watcher.