This project was a lot on everybody, and that's mainly because we were trying to do a lot. The goal of this project was to make an augmented reality art piece that would appear in front of sculptures during the Lighted Art Festival that Napa holds every year. We used Adobe Aero to accomplish that, making animations in After Effects and then transferring them over to Aero to put them in real space. Before I tell some of the many problems that went wrong with this project, I do want to say that I really enjoyed working on this project. It opened my eyes to new programs, new things I could make, and it was fun while we were doing it, for the most part. I had a lot of new experience with programs I had never used before, namely Blender. And it was cool to literally see our art come to life. But there were a lot of struggles that we had to overcome, and most we didn't. The first of the struggles was actually getting people to look at our art. The app we use, Adobe Aero, was very specific in what it could do, and the way we were trying to use it was not the way it was programmed. Because we showed the art pieces with QR codes, it was super complex to set up and if somebody didn't have the app beforehand, it was difficult to pull up the art without instructions. On top of that, there wasn't any WiFi hotspots nearby, so if someone didn't have a service provider they wouldn't be able to pull it up. But most importantly at all, the biggest problem was viewing the art at night. The dandelions actually didn't provide enough glow for the art pieces to be placed in 3D space, and we couldn't view them with that little light coming into the camera. All of these problems came way to late in the creative process, and we trapped ourselves with what we were making so we couldn't adapt to those problems. Not all of the problems came from the whole project, some of them for me came from my own personal project that I was working on, which was a lot more work than I was expecting it to be. Marco and I decided it would be super cool if we made the actual art 3D, instead of just putting art in a 3D space. Not only was that a lot more work to make the art, but I was using a software I never touched before, which was Blender. It was definitely a learning experience, but I should have had at least a little bit of experience before I started this project. Both Marco and I started out with these cool 3D renders, but we both had to drop those renders because of how complicated they were, and the fact that Adobe Aero could only bring in renders with rudimentary shapes. So, I decided to go for a city instead, making a skyline in 3D and planning on lighting it and having moving cars. Making the buildings was surprisingly simple, and all of it fit into Aero perfectly. But the main problems I and was adding detail to my art. As I said before, Aero couldn't handle complex shapes, so when I tried adding windows and lights to only one of the buildings in the skyline, Aero just wouldn't work with the project I had. So, I and to keep the buildings very rudimentary, but I was able to differentiate them with color and height and details like that. I was able to put the cars into the animation, which was the main aspect, them driving up and down the road in the middle of the city. But, the render came out surprisingly well for me never having used the software before. It could've looked a lot cooler, however, if we were working with a better and more sustainable software, and if I had a lot more devotion to this project. Overall, despite the many, many roadblocks we had to face in this project, I'm incredibly happy with I turned out, and even though it won't be with the Dandelions, I'm glad we got to do this project and it taught me a lot about the creative process and prototyping a project. Oh, and to try and keep your expectations realistic.
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FINALLY!!!! After months of hard work, and mostly procrastination, it's finally done! The Phantom Nugget has finally been complete, and it only took 6 months. I actually uploaded this in early December, but I haven't gotten to the blog post until now for some reason. But I was so happy to finally get this off my chest, because the longer I worked on it the worse it made me feel, knowing I could've done it so long ago. But it's done now, and I'm super proud of it. Enjoy. |