I found this great recourse of colour meanings on www.color-meanings.com. Colour can go beyond what colours compliment each other and another layer of skill is to incorporate
VR In tandem with film has the overall look and feel shaped by people incharge of set design, costume design, composition and cinematography. Its been metioned before but the actual framing of a shot in VR is far more subjective than that of film due to the ability for VR’s audiance to be free to move ther
looking at how a productions design can change its themes and feel of the production
Does your audience understand your character and how quickly can they do so. tell this through how they have interacted with there environment
Example. we looke at how promotional art for”Gloomy eyes” promotional image used the rule of thirds to create. However we didn’t realy dive into how this differs when craeting a immersive world rather that 360 contains multiple instances of the rule and how. an element on the right of a frame can be easly view on the left of the audiances view with the audiance having controll of the camera. This requires the worlds to be desingended in a way to considers foot trafic and things that draw the players attention creating paths, lighting, sound that draws the users attention to composed sense within the environment that adhere to an aesthetic design principle.
I found this diagram presenting conflict in literature made by u/Are_We_Cooleo on Reddit using league of legends storylines.
Looking at how shapes could be used to convey character round shapes appear more comforting and natural to people where sharp edges seem more threatening antagonistic and mechanical.
These ideas are altered under different contexts though, a circle inside a circle is often used to convey a viewpoint like a spy camera or peephole, turning a circle into something much more uneasy. I find it to be more interesting is when you challenge conventions. Let’s say you have a character that is meant to be the personification of the Deadly sin of Greed. Often the popular archetype for this design would be large overweight fatness as an indication of gluttony and evil but if you wanted to challenge this the character could be emaciated and skinny to indicate insatiable hunger. Both do a similar job but are depicted in an opposite shape and form. This isn’t limited to characters and applies to objects and environments too. It’s hard to deny the Evilness of the foreboding triangle though.
Lines
The directions of lines can convey a lot to an audience. parallel lines convey order and with an abundance of non-parallel lines can create an aura of chaos.
lines that are vertical present power, control. horizontal lines can resemble stability and set the scale by marking the horizon.
lines continue on in the mind’s eye and can be used to draw the viewers eye to parts of the frame past the termination of the line.
Compasition
The size of an object on a 2d frame changes in size and presence through distance from the camera and the size of the object. In VR you can tell this apart very easily without context clues. To create depth you can ad smoke and particle effects to fill the space between objects. You can accomplish traditional film shots such as close-ups to VR by bringing characters and objects physically close to the viewer. You can also create scale by changing the angle at which the user tilts their head.
This final week before the end of the unit we dove into a little bit more art history.
The Rotunda in London’s Leicester Square was purpose-built for the exhibition of panoramas
Some classic immersive art like panoramic paintings such as those made by Robert Baker. A classmate brought up that they had visited some similar paintings that had blended with 3D objects in the space merging the line between the paintings and the audience.
We Looked at Romanticism and how paintings that portray this art movement prefer to depict scenes in a way that emphasises emotional feel and impact. With few concerns on how plausible it is in our reality only that the viewer has suspension of disbelief and that the scene maximises its emotional feel.
In an exercise, we thought up a “never ended VR story” based on this Wanderer above the Sea of Fog.
I wrote “The man climbed down from the craggy rocks making sure not to dirty his freshly washed clothes. As he makes his way down into the fog he falls on his knees scuffing and tearing his trousers. He wades through the fog searching for his lost lamb. Sometimes finding a gap in the fog. He would clamber up out of the fog to listen for the lambs cry’s that are dampened by the fog. He worries that if he tears up his clothing he would have to retreat home to put on a new set of clothes before coming back another day to return the lost lamb to its herd. He rushes because he worries that predators will find the lamb before he does. Returning home would allow the opportunity to rally help from his family and friends in a search party before setting out. Collecting supplies to aid in the search for the lost lamb.”
I liked the idea of Gamifying this narrative into some sort of Rough-lite game. personally, I find the setting of misty Craigs very familiar to the emotional mimics the emotional response I have to my Scottish home. In thinking about creating such a scene I had an idea for a perspective change in VR.
Continuing to use the painting as a reference, You see the man as an NPC. He has a pair of binoculars around his neck just the same as you the VR player. As you pick up your own binoculars he mirrors your hand, not one to one with your controller but in Keeping with the binoculars target. looking where you look matching your gaze. Bringing up the binoculars to your face would narrow your peripheral vision and as you remove the binoculars it transitions the man to your First-person perspective.
I went looking for tutorials for how to do binocular effects however the only examples I have found at this time are for scopes on guns and that seemed like a bit of a Cunningham’s Law. I’m looking for more of a transitional effect like the ones used in Tender Claw games.
I’d love to try and come up with more unique and specific techniques for transitioning perspectives in VR.
I should also note that I found Frederick Kiesler’s remarks about infinite space (here) ring true to the power of VR and I think he would be a fan.
Edit: I need to look into first and second-order reality more because I didn’t quite understand the distinction.
I added Oculuses spatialised audio to the tools so that the sound interacts with position velocity and its environment. I wanted to make something more for the scene that would make use of sound.
Turntable
In designing a turntable I underestimated the depth of design choices that I would need to make. such as where the player can grab. how the rotation reacts to the position of the player’s hand, whether the hand holds onto the controller position or grab point position.
Record Player
In seek of more objects to emit sound I had the idea for a record player that using joints to imitate the record needle and start playing the music. also possibly later adding the ability to change records and record sides. however, I did not give myself enough time to have this idea so late in production.
After making the controller models vanish when holding an interactable. I had to move the Hand tag ridged body from the controller prefab to the XR toolkit prefab as to not disturb the hand count on the toolkit animation. otherwise, the hands would not register to leave the toolkit collider.
Deciding on the setting wasn’t a huge priority of mine. of course, my first thought whereof a Japanese style garden with paper wall buildings (I even went to visit Kyoto gardens to get a feel for the style) but thinking back to my own experience I first was made aware of bonsai at Royal Botanic Garden Edinburgh when I was very young. I find the art deco and nouveau greenhouses visually interesting and in the back of my mind I intend to create a world for VR-Chat at some point and although the Japanese style is very popular with the Anime fan community’s on VR-Chat I feel as if it a style that’s a little played out.
I found this Victorian-style greenhouse under creative commons through the sketchpad blender plugin and used it as a base to create my main botanical space. this model was made to be viewed from the outside and its supports are hollow on the inside so I cut up the model and turned the curve inside out.
used an empty at a 45-degree rotation and used it as a mirror object for the x and y-axis. I then merged them together and created the centre cross and with Ctrl-F created window pains.
I rescaled the Greenhouse in Unity and remade the materials making the glass have additive transparency so the glass wasn’t completely clear but would let light through.
I feel now that spending a day making the greenhouse larger and into the shape of a cross was a waste as all the gameplay elements take place on a desk and the player is gifted far more space than is needed making it feel as if the room feel large and empty. I added cubes as table placeholders. I ended up removing the table in the centre because it felt isolated and lonesome so I moved the XR Rig and toolkit to be on a table away from the centre. I had I little look at the decor that could help fill all the empty space. TLDR: too much space not enough time.
After importing the tools in FBX format I added the animations from the sheer FBX to it’s prefabs animation controller as well as creating 3 animations in unity for the other 3 tools that would open the
I have been working in Blender to create the bonsai tools for my project. I decided to have the different parts of the mesh divided into separate materials this is less optimal but I thought if I decided to edit the materials in unity later I could visually affect the blade to dull or allow customer colours for the handles and pins. To the 3d cursor to the centre of the pin and then setting the origin point of the parts to the 3d cursor, then rotation one part by 180. I made the Cutters, Trimmers and this way but the sheers ended up being one object so I would need to figure out a different technique other than using a pivot object. I first considered using a vertex displace shader, so I split the UV to have it organised left to right. however, I realised that using bones and weight painting would allow me to have more control over the mesh’s movement in the long run.
sheer UVs
sheer weight painted
broken normals
fixed normals
Thought it would be nice to have a place for the tools to go. I considered having it as a player.
In class, we discussed coding techniques that we could use in our projects and our lecturer (Sokol) suggested I look into Lindenmayer systems to generate my Tree. I find the idea of being able to have my tree grow over time very appealing and is a far cry from the restricted step by step tutorial I had in mind for my project.
Since finding out about L-systems I have watched a few videos including this one video above that shows the L-system growing over time made in Javascript (there GitHub download was broken), as well as 3D l-systems like TreeSketch and ones found on http://www.algorithmicbotany.org/TreeSketch/ and semi interactable unity example on the unity asset store.
In Class Sokol gave us a step by step tutorial talking us through creating the sets of rules (the axioms) and the dictionary that defines those rules with a String builder. I didn’t think I got it to work at first but realised, later on, I just needed to zoom out and I had what you could just about call a tree, Just without deviations, a third dimension, leaves, growth or colour.
I noticed that the sidebar was filled with branch prefabs and found that I could instantiate them as children of the pot by using the above. I think later on I could use this to have branches understand their hierarchy in that when an older branch that is higher on the hierarchy is cut the children of that branch will fall off. However, my understanding of the system right now has it so that when I edit a branch it all branches in its iteration.
I created this script to make it easier to view the l-system in-game view. which rotates the camera around the pot by drawing the mouse across the screen. I did this by using the distance between where the mouse clicked and the mouse currently is.
I then created two scripts, one from the orbit around the Y-axis (up and down) by clicking and dragging the screen and the other so I could zoom in and out. At first, my zoom script moved the cameras transform position but the meant the camera would clip through the leaves so I edited the cameras FOV instead and had it bound to the mouse scroll wheel.
Now that I had set up a rig that allowed me to view the L-system. Iv had to think more about how this will work with a VR player. The XR camera isn’t something I have to worried about however if the Bonsai is on a table, as is the player would have to walk around it. I rather the player be able to use a turntable to rotate the tree as they work on it. I thought having the branches parented to the pot as I had done previously would mean I would just need to change the rotation of the camera to the rotation of the pot. However, because the l-System position is determined only at the Start the rotation of the pot would be implemented after restarting the game. So I would need to put it in an update function to have it rotate the way things are right now but that I feel would scale poorly and be incredibly taxing on the system especially running in VR. I Tried to detect if the tree was moving with an exterior script that would detect if the tree was moving and call an update. this didn’t get me anywhere.
