Every good story needs characters. No matter what medium you're using to tell a story, people latch on to anyone they can relate to or feel for. And if that story happens to be in virtual reality, they can latch on all the more tightly. They share a space with the character. They inhabit its world. They empathize with it, no matter how obviously CGI it is. Case and point: Kiya Notice the way these people move. It's never stiff or robotic. They gesture fluidly to each other. They naturally...
Assignment 4 – Andrew Polino
by Andrew Polino
- November 2
- in
While my use of Mixamo and Fuse models was nowhere near as creative as what I've seen some of my classmates do, this was the assignment I started to feel the ambition. One of my biggest limitations was the fact that I spent the minimal amount of time learning how to import Mixamo characters and design avatars on Fuse (to be fair, it was probably the simplest process of any I've been introduced to in this class) and spent a lot more time stuck on the interactivity problems of Assignment...
Assignment 3 – An Added State of Frustration
- October 10
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The hardest part about this assignment by far was trying to move beyond getting the treasure box to open and close. I wanted to incorporate animals into my scene (birds and butterflies) mainly. My goal was to get them to move to different places on the island. I also wanted to add a boat that would glide up to the part of the shore you stood on when you walked to a certain part of the trigger. This proved to be too ambitious. I didn't even get to the boat...
Assignment 2 – Andrew Polino
- September 26
- in
That surreal moment when you walk your character past the campfire, through a clump of bushes with white flowers, down a set of stone steps, and toward an open field where a fiery orange sunset shines over the beach down below and think to yourself, "I made this"... My first time working with Unity really got me into a creative mode. Even though I had to stop and start everything over again several times, I loved being able to construct a world with pre-made objects and environments. It was a...
Assignment 1 – Andrew Polino
- September 10
- in
I only got to try two pieces of VR hardware during yesterday's class: the Samsung headset and the Oculus Rift DK2, but I was as amazed as the rest of my class about what both of these headsets could do. For the Samsung headset, I got to watch parts of "Waves of Grace". And it really drove home the amazing potential of filming things for VR. The most amazing thing about "Waves of Grace" by far was the sense of placement. Even though what I was seeing was clearly just...