Week 9 reflections
From CTIN482
Here's a link to a youtube video of the EPIC first run of the E.T. scene.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wMVQepLT_eM
--Ben Reese
>>Ben Chang>>
For our first playable demo, we had two measures of the song "Twinkle Twinkle Little Star" and the first 6 frets of an acoustic guitar. Each of the frets were clickable on any of the 6 strings, though the only clickable sections were the intersections of the frets and strings that applied to the song. After our presentation, we noticed that some of our peers experimented with the playable guitar we created. From there, the most important question arose: How are we to create a multiplayer experience that promotes player to player interaction?
Aside from a music education tool, I was really attracted to the idea of using unconventional sounds clips for each guitar fret. As you mentioned, the guitar is "sticky" -- players see it and immediate want to start playing with it. If the guitar were used for a different audio/visual experience, rather than the predictable click-here-play-note-interaction, the possibilities for creating a unique and innovative experience are endless.
>>Ben Chang>>
The Stage - Building and Animating
This week I finished building the ET Scene. It was fairly simple, as I used simple flat prims for the takeoff and landing pads, and textured them with dirt. I populated the dirt surfaces with plants and trees I had in my inventory, and built a simple moon. While I wasn't able to make it as large as I wanted (due to the size limit of Second Life objects), I was able to give the moon a nice glow which looked great when the Second Life Time of Day setting is set to night.
The hardest part of the ET scene was building a ramp that the bike would follow across the moon. I used flat, "invisible" prims so that the ramp was visible, but unobtrusive, and arranged them so that the bike would follow a path similar to that in the film. With the scene built, I then set out to find a bike-object that could be ridden by an avatar. To my luck, I found a free bike model that animated my avatar in a bike riding motion. All I had to do was add the basket that ET rides in onto the front, and stick a little blanket-covered ET into the basket.
Riding the ramp is a little tricky, as you actually have to fly while keeping the bike wheels as close to the ramp as possible (actually ridding the bike through the ramp takes waaaaaaaaaaay to long). But despite this hiccup, the scene looks good and is a decent model of the actual scene in the film. Whether or not this scene will be interesting or engaging for users remains to be seen. But it is large enough to be easy to use, and is visually pretty clear as to how to use.
In addition to finishing the scenes (Eduoard finished the Indiana Jones scene), our group looked into animating software. Since our original goal was to have the scenes be entirely self-playing, so that a single user could film the action without need for another avatar to "act", we tested Poser and QAvimator. While both were fairly easy to use, it was clear that animating avatars would be very difficult and take a very long time to do. So we decided to abandon the idea of animating the scenes and instead focus on polishing the scenes we had and making sure the recording element was in place. Though this does mean that at least two avatars are required to run/film either scene, I think it's important that we focus on realistic goals and the most important parts of our project: establishing scenes that users would be able to film in order to have a better understanding of film cinematography and frame composition.
-Jeffrey Pfingsten
