For my final project at uni, I decided to create an AR board game. I have been fascinated by AR ever since my placement with Dorset Creative. This journey refined my skills within AR and was also great fun!
My first attempt at using Leap Motion and I found it surprisingly easy to set up! Thank you Unity!
The important lesson learnt from this project is to always consider how the user interacts with a system
and design/create the application accordingly.
This is my latest FPS level design. This time we had to take a movie scene we like so I chose the subway level from The Matrix. Our level had to include blueprints (code applied to the level to add effect). I chose to add a working train and elevator as well as changing textures to further highlight the Matrix theme.
This is the first ever app I have created, the brief was simply to make a game for a mobile device. Most people chose to do an android device but seeing as Apple is far more popular I wanted to test my skills with this. The game I created is called GOOOOOOAL and is an endless high score game where you have to tilt the phone to move the ball through goal posts.
This was the first project at Dorset Creative I got to start from scratch and truly tested me in all areas of game design. It was also my first experience making a game for a VR platform. The brief I was given was to create a VR experience bespoke to the RNLI to simply get them excited and potentially win some business. I learnt about the many differences when developing for this platform. For example many camera effects like motion blur and lens flare do not work in VR as we do not notice these elements with our bare eyes and therefore should not be used in VR. There are also many UI considerations as a standard main menu system will not work in VR but instead the menu itself has to be represented in a 3D space, this is also the case with health bars, timers and maps. If you just have these elements as screen UI then it blocks the players vision and can also cause them to be disoriented. I also got to test my 3D modelling skills in this project by creating a lifeboat for the VR demo.
We were approached by Barclays Eagle Labs, who wanted us to create some form of interactive technology to work alongside a wine tasting event held for premium rewards customers. I was given the chance to be the lead in all aspects of this project. The first thing I did, after researching wine related VR and AR experiences, was draft up a brief proposal of ideas highlighting which one we should push forward to development. After a meeting I held with fellow colleagues and the representatives of Barclays Eagle Labs we decided that an AR app would be the best idea as everyone attending the event can use it on their own device and we wouldn't have to provide headsets for a VR experience. The app itself would allow the user to scan a placemat that a bottle of wine is sat on and once the target image is found, additional information on the wine would be shown such as its origin or the best temperature to drink it. Recommended food pairings would also be shown and with a press of a button, it would trigger an animation relevant to the food pairing e.g. if the recommended food was chicken, you would press the food pairing button and some chickens would run across the screen. The name is a play on words with sommelier (a professional wine taster) and AR, the technology we were highlighting with the app. there was also an AR window that when the target image was recognised (in this case a poster) a window frame would be placed on top. Once the user presses the window it triggers an animation that opens it. Through the window you could see a wine vineyard and as this was only in the confines of the window it really felt as if you were looking through a portal to a different country. I created this effect by using high res 360 images of vineyards and creating a 6 sided cube map material with them.
In this assignment we had to rig and animate a character for 3 different movements: idle, walking and running. We then had to import the model with the animations in Unity and blend the animations together along with controls to make it move.
So this isn't a game but it was done in Maya and can be exported to a game engine. Our task was to create a bouncing ball animation and highlight the ability to use ease in and ease out as well as squash and stretch. Creating animations is actually one of my favourite things to do so I had lots of fun doing this. I chose a basketball because I like the sport and its also a bouncing material.
So far this has been my toughest assignment. We had to create a 3d character using Zbrush, based on a theme and I chose Star Wars. We did not have to texture the model but this is something I may do at a later date. There is also a low poly version of my model that was less than 15,000 polys.
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Maya Model - Aeroplane
Like for my level design assignment, this is my first time attempting to make a 3d model in Maya. We have been given the task to build a model using an image as a reference.