Artists
The Artists worked together with the UI/UX Designers to flesh out a the story process of the Mix and Match character. After debating between two final ideas: having the character be built as the story progressed or having the Mix and Matched character have independent scenes built around the triggering object. We decided to move forward with the latter decision because of the user experience we want to create. The experience with the first option required a very specific order of triggering objects as there is a story linking the scenes, whereas the second option allowed users to find objects at their leisure and not have to backtrack in their current walk to find an object to trigger the next scene in the story.
Ray also sketched a set of characters with a few rules the artists had to discuss about moving forward within the scope of technology and also the scope of the semester. These rules included a preset size for the connection between the head and the torso as well as the torso and the legs, the character would need to be able to have a humanoid rig, and that no body parts look like they belong to a “correct” character but more truly random, and that none of the characters remind you immediately of innate popular characters from other IPs. Below is the set of drawings.
The Artists also created a prototype model using these as a reference for their creation.
Beyond this, the artists did a bit more research about 3D characters in AR, and Hagan did more research on retargeting motion capture data within Maya before moving it the the game engine.
Programmers
The Programmers accomplished some major strides this past week. Cleo was able to solve the memory leaking problem in the image reprocessing in the gold spike project and is currently working towards getting that to feed the processed image into the machine learning model. Robin got the ARFoundation Remote Plugin and tested with it and it seems to work pretty well. This will save them the build time for tiny changes, and now that they have the camera working, the can know if something is not working properly and get debug messages in the editor. Robin also became familiar with the process of building the app on iOS and uploading it to TestFlight for the clients to use. Building iOS with XCode App was more complicated than was expected but the programmers reached out to a previous programmer on the project who was helpful and provided instructions instead of the programmers having to do trial and error.
UI/UX Designers
The UI/UX Designers used the time spent with the Artists and the discussion about the experience following the Mix and Match animation experience to help guide their discussions about making wireframes and then a prototype UI that the UI Designers showed the client on Thursday. Both Zhiqi and Tiange created two wireframes individually and then they worked together to create the first prototype. Below is what was presented to the client in our meeting with them.
Furthermore, Zhiqi did research on AR mobile user experience and analytics and created a new version of the User Journey Map. Tiange did more research on similar products to Snob Bog’s Aim and also created a new version of the Persona files. Both creations can be seen below.
