Week04 Task - Model Development, End-User testing, and Interactive PDFS.

Task for Studio - Alternating between a progressive Digital and Sketched design process:


1) Work on refining your draft Digital Conceptual Model, paying attention to animations, details and textures.

2) Start with some old fashioned ways of working. Through the medium of sketching, create a rough storyboard of ways in which you may animate your concept model. Approach it as a story of how each of your components will behave, and how your concept model would unpack into its components and reassemble as a whole.

3) Through the medium of sketching, begin to design your final physical object (the one consisting of min 4 AR markers). This physical object should work to complement your thematic and conceptual standpoint of your Concept Model.

4) With the inspirations from Week03 lecture develop a sketch storyboard to look at ways in which your physical model may work as an Augmented Reality Installation. Will you strictly control the sequence of how your Digital Concept Model is to unfold, or will you give the user a degree of flexibility in unpacking it? Will your AR markers appear one by one, or would multiple/all appear in the scene at any given moment?

5) Scan and post all of the above to your blogs. 

Independent Task - Shopping, Evaluation, and Modelling (Physical + Digital):


1) Do some shopping and start on your model! Buy ample supplies of cardboard (2mm or thicker), model glue, metal ruler, and a pair of box cutter knives to successfully complete your physical object. You can get all these from the UNSW Quad Store or by making a trip down to Oxford Art Supplies. There is nothing to stop you from going more ambitious with your physical model/materials, but do not create physical objects that look flimsy, held together with tape, that lack care and attention.

2) With the sketched ideas explored in class, continue to develop your Digital Concept Model in tandem with your physical object. Drop a light into your 3dsMax environment (any mr Omni works best). 

3) Pay attention to the "detect-ability" of your designed AR markers. Put your markers through an image editor to make the less fine, monochromatic, and highly pixelated. Alternatively, design a new set of markers that relate to your Digital Concept Model. This link gives best practices on making readable AR markers http://www.buildar.co.nz/buildar-pro-2/tutorial/tutorial-part-5/ 

4) Post a draft video of your AR object in motion. I prefer to use camstudio as a screen capture software http://camstudio.org/

5) Blog a technical evaluation of the success, problems encountered, and solutions pondered when you are transferring information from one application into another. You may write this evaluation as a short video or post a series of images with text explanation. Detecting errors ASAP will avoid any last minute hiccups and will get you thinking of other workarounds. See below for an example:



Technical Issues to consider:

Keeping the polygon count to a processable number. Think of modifiers such as optimize that may work to reduce your polycount.

Models become too bright as your light intensity is not scaled with the Build AR. You will need to toggle it down proportionately 

Some modifiers you used for the purpose of animation may not work in Build AR.

Materiality should be kept as standard Mental Ray Material (nothing from Arch + Design, just standard material with bitmap textures)

AR Marker issue as explained above.