Sorry for the very late post(s)- going into week 4 the loading information I have absorbed is astounding. After going through many motions of AR application in Unity using Vuforia I am starting to see that instead of only seeing mindless buttons that I have no understanding of, now I’m starting to see a path of logical computer behavior. This has helped me understand the platform a bit better and have overcome an intimidation level that I thought might not ever leave. As a group we had an AR assignment to make a game- ours was a little “follow the clues” segment of Sesame Street characters that gave statements, then based on those statements a person would choose who was the cookie criminal. Here is a little example below.
To further this concept we learned about character downloads into Unity and how to animate them using services like Maximo, Turbosquid and RADiCAL. This was a bit of relief as I was worried I would have to make all own characters for my final project music video. These providers help seamlessly download characters then rig them (animate them) into Unity so as you press play the character will move.
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Using the Animator you’re able to connect movements and elements in a maze of your choosing. At this point in my learning, a lightbulb came on and saw yet again that animating a scene is completely within my ‘control’ and again that gave me some relief. When I am putting my elements together for my final project I see this is where a lot of final tweaking will occur.
Week 5
This week we all received our Oculus Headsets. So exciting! I have very little experience using a headset at all; so I’m very happy we are at a point in our course that we will finally be able to apply our knowledge thus far into this. Antoine has been doing our pre-recorded content for class and week 5 was an introduction to coding in application to Unity. I expected to come to this segment at some point during my studies at LCC however I didn’t expect to just dive right in. Coding has been a little bit of a taboo subject that a.) I know nothing about coding b.) it looks scary c.) refer to point a.)
In his pre-recorded content he showed us how “simple” coding can be used to animate an object within the C#. I learned that depending on what you want to accomplish there are certain areas of the code where you want to write. If you want to only run an animation or something once through the program its best to write it in the “Start” however if you want it to be run throughout the program to write it in the “Update” are where it is read once per frame (fps=frame per second) and in this particular code there are 60 fps.
Through his basic tutorial it was clear that C# code is able to become somewhat of a calculator, which when manipulated can become a clock and if you can make a clock then, what I gather is you can have animation go at a certain time, frame, or condition. Though I am still very unsure of coding and the language of C# I do I see its importance and purpose in relation to how it would save someone a lot of time in animation, even within the animator if they were to simply code their way. By the end of the tutorial I was able to make a cube rotate and add the component of the directional light rotation to mimic a sunset. (I was pretty proud of myself) Coding in C# however is a skill that I will need learn the language of in order to understand more clearly where and why I am writing within the code frame.