When I had first heard about the three artifacts and what we had to do in them, my first thoughts were, “This seems impossible”, but as the weeks progressed and we learned new softwares and their basics, I came to a realisation that maybe it was doable after all. When we were asked to write a critical appraisal on the entire unit, I didn’t know where to begin. The thing about writing critical appraisals is that you’re never able to fully include everything you want to say. As for me, I have never written one before so I really don’t know what I’m talking about but I will try my best to explain my journey and take you along for the ride.
360
While filming with the 360 cameras, my mistake was that I didn’t know I had to render all the videos to my phone the second I took them otherwise they wouldn’t be saved. I, with my teammates, recorded 7 videos and saved 6 and had to redo one since the one shot in our canteen was too dark. This was a problem that took a long time to overcome due to the continuation of classes and limited free time. I finally hired a camera and tripod around 5 weeks later and single-handedly recorded the remaining two videos, discarding the canteen video and doing the hallway instead. It made me feel responsible and in charge of this group artifact. Creating the virtual room, or the Hub, in After Effects was no easy feat to achieve either. It looked extremely complicated. It took a while to understand it but after a few YouTube tutorials later the software became slightly less infuriating. I had to take the recorded videos from my phone to After Effects, add a 2D edit to make the video interactable and add text to it. I used the website called Eevo.com to combine all my videos and the Hub. The website was insufferable, despite adding all the hotspots needed, it refused to show up in the preview. It resulted in me pestering Pierre multiple times over a span of various emails and disruptions in class until I finally had a grasp of what I had to do to fix it which was to re-edit each video and the Hub and added circles to them so that the hotspots became interactive. Once that was done, the project was pretty much finished.
Unity
I dreaded doing this artifact as during the time we were learning it, I found it complicated and therefore didn’t fully pay attention to what was happening. I delayed doing it until my other 2 projects were done and then I had no choice but to start it. I made a layout of what my world representing my hometown would look like and gave it three buildings which are considered major attractions back home. Scrolling through Sketchfab and Turbosquid, the 3D models websites, and trying my level best to find free, downloadable models of Indian architecture was the most painful task ever. I even had to pay 3 whole pounds for the India Gate. I kept persevering and after searching multiple prompts and scrolling intensely, I finally found half decent models which I knew would demonstrate a good enough representation of how they actually looked like. From creating separate materials, to downloading various models which I never ended up using, I am just glad I managed to finish on time
Spark AR
My favourite artifact that I finished before anything else. I had no problems doing this one at all. It was smooth sailing. Mainly because I had the time to see YouTube videos to understand the software better. I found images which resembled how I wanted the character to look, added the objects, and drew the rest on Illustrator tracing the images on a face reference asset that was same as the uv in the software and added it to my character. Out of all the three softwares I learned, I am certain that I am the most confident in Spark AR.
CONCLUSION
These projects tested my patience, perseverance and my ability to meet challenges head on, how to fix them and power through. They taught me that despite being in a group project, sometimes you have to be the responsible one and for the sake of your group, do all the work yourself and let them take credit as well. Sometimes you have to adapt quickly to new changes and learnings and swallow your pride and ask others for help no matter how simple something may seem. It may be slightly annoying that I had to do all the work for the 360 film myself but I’m also glad it was this way as I got more experience and learning out of it. The virtual world, no matter how easy it was for the others, was not even half as easy for me and although I am proud of what the end result was, I can’t say I feel the same about the journey that lead to it. At the end of the day, as long as I managed to conquer my fears, confront them and beat them and actually finish everything on time, I was satisfied. It’s safe to say that I have been enjoying the course so far and I can definitely see myself working in the field of Virtual Reality.