Week 1 Low-fi AR
This week I made two low-fi AR filters with transparent sheets. The first one is inpired by the multimedia project "Adam by Eve" which tells a story of two high school students wandering into a strange world created by an one-eyed monster. This AR filter is what I imagine that world to be - occupied by one-eyed monsters and mysterious creatures. The second one is just a funny and dumb filter tht turns people into god...
Week 2 Face
In manga and anime, sometimes a flower sprouts out of a character's head as a manga symbol, meaning they're happy, carefree, and peaceful. So I thought it would be fun to create a dancing flower on one's head to depict happiness.
I built the flower character in blender and rigged it with two bones. The lower bone has a "Stretch to" contraint on it so that it will move with the upper bone and create a squash and stretch effect. Then I parented the mesh to the bones and tweaked the vertex weights to make the mech deform correctly. I also keyframed the dancing animation.
The next step was exporting the animated mesh and importing it into lens studio. I failed several times before finally making it work. What I learned was that you need to export the amature together with the mesh to get the animation. Also there are a few export settings you need to adjust according to the official guide.
Here's the final filter! It's cute and I'm quite happy with it.
Week 3 Image
[ Sorry I totally forgot the assignment prompt when I was making this image tracking filter...]
I like taking polaraid photos to capture the precoius moments in my life. Last weekend I went to BTS's concert and took a photo after the concert ended. Seeing them perform on stage again means a lot to me and I want to make this memory special. So I decided to make a AR filter with the polaraid photo I took.
First, I created some sticker-style assets in photoshop. They are elements I extracted from the concert's poster.
Then I exported all the stickers as seperate pngs and imported them into After Effects. I animated the elements' sizes with the Elastic expression to create a pop-up effect. I also made them rotate in different directions and speeds.
In lens Studio, I created a Marker Tracking object with the Polaraid photo. To place content on top of it, I added an image object and parented underneath the Marker Tracking object. Then, I exported the animation I created as png sequences and imported them into Lens as a 2d animation clip. The final step was to use the animation as texture for the image object. After everything was done, I exported the filter to my phone and it worked perfectly! I really like how this AR filter makes my memory special and I bealive this is the true power of AR.
Week 4 Body
This week I made a virtual garment of metallic hands. Here's what it looks like:
First, I created the model asset in Blender based on a hand mesh I downloaded from Sketchfab. The original mesh has too many vertices, so I used the Decimate modifier to reduce the faces. I positioned the hands in different directions and sizes so that the garment will look different in different angles.
Then I imported the 3D asset into Lens Studio and adjusted its position to fit the body. To block the hands that are supposed to be behind the body, I applied a Occuler material to the body mesh. It worked but wasn't perfect - sometimes the occuler doesn't match the real body and breaks the illusion. But over all the filter is pretty cool and I'm satisfied.
Week 5 Environment
As a jellyfish lover, I always wonder what it'd be like if jellyfish could swim in the air. This week I created a jellyfish lens which enables people to put a jellyfish in their surrounding environments.
As usual, I built the 3d model in Blender, rigged it, and created a simple animation. In Lens Studio, I utilized the Simple World template and replaced the default cloud mesh with my jellyfish. And to make the jellyfish translucent, I created a Simple PBR material and set the Blend Mode to "Screen". I also modified the TweenTransform script to make it go up and down slowly. There's only one issue - sometimes the jellyfish doesn't show up after scanning the environment. Maybe it's because the world mesh is not working correctly?
Final AR Menu
It's always hard for me to decide what to eat in a restaurant. I don't know what a dish is like and how it tastes by reading the menu descriptions, so I always go to Yelp to find pictures and reviews. But this process often takes a long time. I think an AR menu would be a good idea to help customers make decisions.
First, I downloaded three 3d -canned dishes from Sketchfab and made a rotating animation for each of them in Blender. Then I imported the animaions and some UI elements I made into After Effects and composed the left and right part of the menu seperately. I also made an ITP restaurant menu to be the image tracker.
In Lens Studio, I created a marker tracking object with the menu image and layered the two animations on top of it. To make the reviews only appear when the user taps on the dish, I added a behaviour script which toggles the visibility of the review section when a tap event is triggered.
