ITP BLOG
The flow from After Effects to Maya worked perfectly this week until I tried to link the video content to the plane. At that point, the video wouldn’t connect. I re-named the files, re-imported them, and restarted the project to no avail.
I am looking forward to office hours to fix the situation.
For my PCOMP final, I decided to combine a few of my favorite things, data visualization, and surfing. My goal was to measure my acceleration on a wave, graph the data, and present it in a physical form.
The first step was to get the circuitry up and running on dry land before taking it out in the water. This didn’t prove easy because I couldn’t get the SD card reader to link up with my Arduino Nano 33 IoT. After spending just under a week working on the problem and going to office hours, I decided to try a new board—Sarah Ro to the rescue with a board that worked immediately with the same wiring. I still have no idea if the original boards were faulty or I was doing something wrong, but that’s a problem to figure out over break. With the board up and running, I put my setup in a waterproof housing and got it down to the beach.
It was a cold December afternoon, but I was determined to get out in the water and test it out. I couldn’t find a way to mount the device to my board successfully, so I decided to put it inside my wetsuit. With everything all set, I paddled out, hoping that the case was waterproof, the circuit would keep working in the rough water, and it was recording data.
*I got a lot of weird looks with a rectangle shape on my back.
Just under an hour, I paddled back in the cold and hoping for the best. To my surprise, everything was still working. The glue came undone, and the board was rattling around, so I need to address that later.
My excitement caught the attention of some strangers on the beach who took my photo after explaining what I was doing.
Back home, I was able to upload and explore the data, which all came through!
The next step was to make a physical product of the data. In illustrator, I used the Pen Tool to make a path of three waves that I rode in the session. I then put each wave on its own blue acrylic plastic piece and cut them in the laser cutter.
For the final construction, I layered the three-wave diagrams on top of each other and all three on orange backing.
I laser cut a .23 diameter hole through the pieces and pressed an acyclic dowel in to hold the piece together.
The acrylic dowel was 4 inches long and also acted as a stand for the piece.
Close up view.
I’m thrilled with how this piece turned out in the end! There are a few things that I would like to consider in future iterations.
Version 2:
We were tasked to create a Cornell box, so I created a three-story tower full of items that describe who I am. The animation throughout the piece is a 3D scan I did of myself dancing to different music genres.
Below is a screenshot of the sequence module that I used to track my character and the other animations in the piece.
Going Foward:
I’m really excited about this project and how far it evolved over the course of a couple of weeks.
This week Shannon Hu, David Leyva, and I collaborated on a virtual sound walk using Unity. The goal was to build a wilderness themed maze using assets from the Unity Store and sound triggers. As the player progresses through the maze, they would encounter various noises triggered by invisible collision frames. Our sounds would be made up of recorded and found clips that we edited in Audition.
First, we tackled building the maze from a hand-drawn sketch. 
We found an asset package that included Redwood tree models that we used as the walls. From this point on, our problems with Unity began.
The world quickly got confusing to work with, so we deleted most of the assets and started over.
For this second piece, we removed the idea of a maze and scattered trees simulating an old-growth forest of Redwoods. With the triggers adequately placed, the character can experience birds chirping, a wolf howling, bears growling, and a few other surprises. We also were able to import rabbits and birds that a player can find.
In the end, we would like to add more wildlife and possibly create some creatures. We would also like to make the forest denser without altogether impeding the character from moving.
Below is a working version of the world uploaded to simmer.io.
From this exercise, I believe that I started to grasp the basic fundamentals of Unity and look forward to creating more worlds!
