Virtual reality music video – Final thoughts

Overall I am quite happy with the outcome of my scene. Although there are some lingering issues. When I built and viewed my project in VR for the first time, the first scene at the tube station has a lot of flickering in some areas of the building. The one common traits amongst the flickering parts is that they were all black. Of course correlation does not always correspond to causation, and despite having no explanation for it being the case, I can’t help but wonder whether this is the reason – although real research is needed. It could also be related to the type of material used in the model. In the coming days I will investigate further and come to a proper conclusion to avoid similar issues in the future.

For my next project I will spend more time searching for 3D models, as I don’t think my project performed as well is it could visually. Aesthetic wise it was quite all over the place – there was a large variety of visual styles and at varying quality. This meant there was not much consistency in the appearance of my visuals. There was a beautiful and intricately modelled and textured tube tunnel one second and very simple and visually unappealing buildings the next and due to the fact that my past discipline was artistic, this pains me. I’ve heard that you potentially colour grade unity projects somehow, and if possible I’d definitely do that in the future to help tie all elements of the project together and make a far more pleasing environment in addition to of course using models of a similar quality. I feel as if there’s little point in getting immersed somewhere you don’t want to be, therefore I want to make my scenes as visually appealing as possible. I have fantasies of one day building in Unity an environment with a consistent stylised aesthetic and visual language, but in order to do so I will have to design everything then model it in Maya. I look forward to being proficient enough make something to appease my artistic standards.

For my next project I think I’ll be in a far better position because I have a better understanding of project management. I know the elements of a project; what goes into it and roughly the time it takes to implement each part. For example, at first I had no sense of how long it would take me to write each script and admittedly this had tempted me to bee less ambitious with what I wanted achieve, solely because I was too scared to try something I was wholly unfamiliar with and didn’t want the feeling of inadequacy everyone gets when they’re learning something new. I have also noticed how difficult and time consuming to make a game that flows perfectly and efficiently. Coding meant a lot of researching, and there are many ways of accomplishing a goal, and I’ve found that some styles can make a game faster and some slower. Thankfully this term I have really surprised myself and learned what I am capable of. I have a better grasp of how long it takes me to learn something by taking into account my strengths and weaknesses in multiple components of Unity. This means in the future I can plan projects in a more effective manner and ensure my workflow is as efficient as possible. The majority of this project was built quite late just because of the steep learning curve I encountered and hadn’t anticipated.

Virtual reality music video – Process

I firstly added a tube tunnel to my scene, added lights, then multiplied the both the tunnel and lights separate times to create one long tunnel. I then added waypoints and a mouth to go at the end of the tunnel. Then I added the bedroom at the end, and the buildings and terrain as part of my end scene. In my storyboard I originally had the intention of a finale taking place on top of a skyscraper while fireworks were set off. I then realised that this would be a bit too complicated as I needed to many 3D models for what I had planned, which had the potential of causing the scene to be slow.

The tube station I downloaded originally as a Blender file, I then converted it to FBX and imported it into my scene. Each other model was an FBX so I textured them with their pre-made textures or textured them myself by making new materials and assigning colours to them (this was the case for many of the skyscrapers I downloaded). I added these skyscrapers to the scene in order to surround the camera at the end and hide the unity background to ensure the user doesn’t get distracted from the experience to maintain a sense of presence. I also think that the large sense of scale will be impressive to the user, and capitalises on VR’s strengths as a medium.

To help facilitate a greater sense of presence in the music video I focused a lot on the timing with the song. I tried to time the explosions in my video with the music, as well as speeding up and slowing down the speed of the camera with the tempo of the song. This however wasn’t always the case, as in parts of the video I intentionally slowed it down or sped it up for the sake of practicality. For example, when the camera goes through the bedroom I slowed down the camera speed, as the bedroom was very small and at would take only a split second to pass through, meaning the viewer wouldn’t be able to see the room properly nor register the animated character. Once slowed down the camera passed through the room at a far more pleasing pace, ensuring the viewer can properly take in the scene.

Virtual Reality Music Video – Ideas

I Chose the song ‘Headz gone West’ by Nia Archives. The lyrics are short and succinct yet paint a great picture of a restless headspace. I wanted to embrace that with my music video.

Link to Padlet:

https://padlet.com/clarachilderley/9yrbet23snqb37b

I will start the process by finding the assets I’ll need. At first I had the idea to model some myself, I then however realised that it would be a bit too ambitious to do so.

Model I need:

Tube station, tube train, tube tunnel, woman, mouth, buildings, grass terrain.

The main problem I had is finding a good black woman model, it seemed like I exhausted all measures to find one. I eventually went to ‘Makehuman’ to make my own 3D character model but it didn’t seem right. Just as I had begun to think my efforts were in vain I remembered the existence of ‘Mixamo’. I found a great model on there which I will use in my music video.

After showing my storyboard to the class and tutors I was happy with the feedback I got; the main words of guidance being that I need to be careful when it comes to the speed of the camera movement, as if it’s any quicker than what the view can bear, it will initiate the onset of motion sickness – something I myself struggle with. Therefore while setting the speed of the camera I will remain sensitive to the pace I think myself and others will be able to handle.

Elements of animation

Follow through and overlapping

The action of Follow Through and Overlapping refers to two closely related techniques which help to ensure movement has realism to it, and to make sure it seems as if the objects and characters abide by the laws of physics, including the principle of inertia.

Follow Through is the idea that loosely connected parts of a body or object will continue moving after the character has stopped.

Overlapping Action is a similar idea in that it describes how different parts of a body or object tend to move at different rates.

Arcs

Arc is the movement in circular paths.

Human beings do not move in one straight direction. They move in arcs. In the same way, the arc technique is to help animation create that illusion of movement.

Without arcs, the animation will look stiff and mechanical.

Slow in slow out

Slow in slow out is when an object or character in an animation starts its movement slow, gains speed, then decelerates. This is so that that the beginning and end of the movement is softened.

An animated journey

Georges Melie was well known for his use of special effects, he popularised techniques such as substitution splices, multiple exposures, time-lapse photography, and hand painted colour on screens.

His most notable work would be Le Voyage Dans La Lune (A trip to the moon) from 1902. It is considered the first film with visual effects, audience members were astonished at the time 

Animation has since evolved, and with the technological advancements of the latter half of the 20th century, a new kind of animation was born.

In 1972 a film released entitled ‘A computer animated hand’ by Edwin Catmull and Frederic Parke. It was the world’s first 3D rendered film, it shows how a mold was made of Ed’s hand, on which polygons were very precisely drawn and measured.

The pioneering techniques used are the basis for 3D rendering we still use today in video games, movies, and special effects.

Despite the many advantages of this emerging medium, some were still sceptical that it could ever overtake hand-drawn animation.

Pros

  • Superior movement – All characters and objects are built in a 3D space meaning you simply move the camera around in a similar way to how you could move a camera in the real world. This gives you more flexibility with moving through the world. It also allows you characters to rotate in 3D space without having to redraw each frame. Once your character is modelled, the animation process can be quite quick, excluding texturing and rendering of course. 
  • Provides the capacity to be more ambitious with a piece of work, there are more possibilities.  E.g. You can do dangerous stunts.
  • More realistic – Technology has advanced so much that you can now create photorealistic renders of your animation.
  • Reuse models – Once you have modelled your character, you can reuse them in an infinite amount of new projects, which will save you both time and resources. 
  • There’s a bigger market for it. Production houses like Disney, Dream works and Pixar has helped drive the popularity of 3D animation across all platforms.
  • far less time consuming than cell based animation, which is the traditional way of drawing frame by frame, involves redrawing every single frame. If you keep in mind that in the UK there are 25 frames per second that soon adds up to hundreds of drawings for a relatively short animation. 
  •  Not necessarily time consuming to correct mistakes. 
  • Can make more detailed and complex images in less time. 
  • 2D can feel less dynamic compared to 3D. If for example you wanted to animate a car rolling, creating this in 2d would be really tricky as you would need to redraw the car from several angles and would become very time consuming. Alternatively, if you created the car in 3d space, you can simply rotate the car without having to redraw the car several times. 
  • As 3D becomes more available there seems to have been a decrease in demand for 2D animation. It is still popular and widely used, but 3D seems to be the ‘flavour of the month’. 

Cons

  • Limited imagination – 3D is tricky to stylise compared to the vast array of styles that can be created in 2D. There is a reason that most 3D animated characters have a similar style. You are somewhat limited by the rig when creating a character. 
  • A bigger investment – 2D animation can be a lot cheaper than 3D animation. This is mainly due to the advancements in software meaning not all animation needs to be drawn frame by frame, therefore reducing production time and in turn costs. 
  • Slower to make than 2D animation
  • More complicated – There are several elements involved in making a 3D animation that complicate the process compared to 2D animation. When making a 2D animation, you design the characters and animate them. When working in 3D you need to model the character, animate the character, add lightning and create textures before you are able to see a glimpse of what the final animation will look like. It is a time consuming process and requires a lot of computer power to produce. 
  • Software – The software used to create 2D animation is not as draining for your machines as 3D animation software. You won’t need a huge render farm with beefy graphics cards to run the software, although it would make renders fly. 
  • Long lead times – Before you even get to see your character there is a lot of work involved which results in longer lead times.
  • 2D animations seem to be more story orientated. When working with 3D objects, it is easier to get the ‘wow factor’ with sweeping camera moves and powerful effects, but this can sometimes distract from the story or more intimate moments.