Year 1 – Virtual reality music video project – Final
Portfolio of a series of reviews:
Storyboards:
https://artslondon.padlet.org/agrajdeanu0320211/r2nl4q16ye41b6r3
Screenshots of my music video:
Process of everything:
From the beginning I knew that I wanted to do the song, “Feels like summer” by Childish Gambino since the lyrics had severe undertones of global warming and climate change. Due to the semi-direct lyrics, I was able to come up with an idea on how to set up my virtual scene quite easily. Having the viewer walk through a neighborhood which turns chaotic is a metaphor for the world’s “health” getting worse and worse.
November 23rd 2021: I started my project by downloading models from cgtrader.com, importing them in Maya, changing the colors/textures, and then exporting them into Unity.
November 24th 2021: I uploaded all the assets into Unity where I began to set the scene. I followed my storyboards in creating a neighbourhood with houses and alleyways. I drank some coffee and then decided to play around with the foundation of the houses; Moving, rotating, and scaling individual pieces:
Now as shown in my 15 storyboards, there were supposed to be insects and a character boy who the viewer would walk behind and observe, but I think the message of the song would’ve gone across regardless of the character being there or not; The feeling of the song is shown through the changes in the environment and in the lighting in my opinion.
November 25th 2021: I began working on the lighting rotation and colour animations to mimic a day to night cycle. Using intense colours for the sunrise and sunset at first;
Some problems that I ran into with this method of making a day and night cycle were:
1: The street and sidewalks turned black
2: There was still the skybox lighting in the background
3: There was no way to add multiple colours/lights to make the sunrise and sunset more realistic
I solved these issues by adding a fog effect on the lighting so that the viewer would not notice the skybox lighting in the distance. Furthermore, I added another white directional light which I animated the intensity of in accordance to the day and night cycle to fix the black street and sidewalks.
Animated the clouds, streetlamps (turn on when it was dark and off when there was light), and the camera motion to see how it all looked together. Also added the audio of the full song to the project so it would play on start. I’d say if I wanted too, this could be the end product – Maybe I could fix the white lines that look like glitches on the street.
November 26th 2021: I had the idea to add cars moving and a bird flying by. I found 3 models of cars on cgtrader.com and a bird which had wings as a separate mesh. I then animated them all to work together around the song lyrics, ““Rolling faster, faster, not a chance to slow down, Slow down” and “Birds were made for singing, wakin’ up to no sound, No sound”. I had trouble lining up the audio with the animation of the cars driving by, but after many attempts I got it close enough.
Additionally, I was able to record a full run through of the whole scene, without the music playing since I was in class.
In total, all I accomplished this day was reanimating and rearranging the clouds, animating a large tree growing in the distance, getting the car animations in sync with the song, and animating a bird flying by.
November 29th 2021: Went to the LCC building to work on my project but there was a leak so they closed the building for the day.
November 30th 2021: Went to LCC around 9:30 in the morning, animated two more types of birds, added red particle systems on the crazy side, and fixed the former issue that I had with the default skybox sun and sky colours by creating a new material of skybox, changing the colours and other features. The sky is now a lovely shade of purple and pink. Created a cul-de-sac with more homes and then began to figure out how to get the oculus quest 2 headset working with unity. After trying in many different ways (using the XR management plugin, OVRcamera rigging, and the XR interaction toolkit) I was still unable to see my music video in the virtual world. I spoke with Antoine and he also had trouble pinpointing the solution to the problem. We came to the conclusion that the computers were not updated with the most recent version of Android. Furthermore, they required updated versions of SDK, NDK, JDK, and Gradle which I could not download and install due to needing the admin username and password on the school computers. After nine hours of working on this project today, I decided there was nothing more I could do to fix the issue with the Unity program and Oculus. I took the bus home and began working on the rest of the necessary aspects of the project (presentation, blog post, and essay). I will try to use Annie’s or Margarida’s laptop tomorrow to see if I can get a VR video for my presentation and final product.