Day 57: On Form & Formlessness
It's early days on this piece, but boy has it been one long migratory path to even get here. Let's start with the idea itself:
You, as the Traveler, gets to swim with an elephant in the ocean. But you are quick to notice that it's actually the displacement of water particles that lets your mind fill in the negative space for what looks like an elephant. You also can feel those particles intermingling with your own. Is it a spirit? The leftover traces of a species long gone?
As a test, I wanted to see if I could make this description tangible, even as a proof of concept. And because it's me, of course it involves a XR cocktail of some kind. These are the steps I took:
Blocks: This was my first stop in regards to producing anything because it's such a great tool for ideating something very quickly while also creating something game ready because of its low poly nature. So with a variety of primitives, stretching and modifying away, I speedily put this ellie together.
Masterpiece Motion: Next up in the pipeline came to rigging this baby up with the simplest of skeletons. I still don't think I fully know what I'm doing in this program beyond the very basics of drawing the bones, weight painting and exporting. Suffice it to say, Ellie survived this part of the process.
Tvori: To animate a little swim cycle, it was all about Tvori and making sure that I had a enough motion to work with that when the actual body was taken away as a proxy, the particles could do the work of showcasing the form. Again, because I knew what a doozy I was in for on the game engine side, I really didn't want to get bogged down with the finer details as of yet. This came out to about 10 seconds. You may notice the deformation of the ellie itself, which is something that tends to happen between Motion and Tvori and I suspect it's something about the way I'm rigging it. The good thing is that it comes out relatively unharmed once exported.
Unity: And so we come to the crux of it all. Unity is like a game of digital Jenga, but with a treasure hunt aspect to it. I've actually made it sound way more fun than it is because although there are quite a few ways to pull this off, much of it is quite opaque due to lack of centralized documentation. While leveraging the immortal genius of coder/wizard Keijiro for pulling off this magic trick, it was quite rough getting to this point. Of the variety of ways one can accomplish this, words like point cache, vector fields and Houdini come up which involves third party software.
But it really wasn't until I saw my talented and crafty friend Jason Gluck's AR posting using Keijiro's Skinner that I saw a clearer path to what I wanted without having to jump through too many hoops. And after testing my ellie out in that asset, I found the VFX Graph equivalent to what I would need in this package. And after several starts and stops, I finally was able to create this.
The next stop is actually going to be remaking the ellie in Gravity Sketch with its just released Sub D tools, making VR modeling that much more robust. I suspect that I will still be able to achieve the same level of low poly but also not compromising on the details that I want for it feel more articulated. Stay tuned!
