Month: October 2018

This past Wednesday our team presented to the ETC faculty and student body, showing off the work we’d  accomplished to date.

The highlight for most was a live demo that showcased the crux of what we’ve been working on—it featured a real actor (in this case, a stand in for a real actor) looking at and talking to Tinker Bell, and her in turn responding, followed by her interacting with a physical prop that will be used in our set.

Proving that we could make all of these elements come together was crucial to the project’s viability and gives us confidence as we push forward throughout the remainder of the project. With the essential problems of the project addressed, we now can focus on creating the rest of the content knowing that it will, at its core, actually work.

Here’s what else happened this week:

Set Design: Lights for both practical effects and for actor cueing have been ordered. Labor has been contracted to build the walls of the set. A layout for where all cueing lights will be placed on set has been created.

Programming: Aside from the borderline-heroic work of getting the live demo to happen, a decision has been made to move away from Vuforia (and its associated image markers) in favor of spatial mapping and manual marker placement.

Animation: With the rig finally ready (thanks, Sahar Kausar!), we’ve been able to block out Tink’s general flight path in Unity, which is the first step to ensure that she’s ready to work with our human actors. Next week the rig will be updated to include cleaned up weight painting, finger controls, facial expression blenders, and adjusted wing control.

Misc. Production: We are working with a sound designer (Anthony Stultz) for Tink’s sound effects and “dialogue,” so we met with him and had a conversation about what we hope everything to sound like and how we’ll integrate them into the show. We also met with our actor playing Peter (Will Harrison), to get his measurements for his costume as well as onboard him into the whole process of how this is all going to work.’

Finally, we updated our production schedule. Wish us luck!

 

We’re many things over at team TheatAR, but probably least among them are furniture builders. Despite all of us having assembled IKEA furniture in our pasts, none of us were quite ready for the hell that was assembling the dresser we ordered off Amazon. We grabbed our tiny little Allen wrenches and got to work, however, and many hours later, we totally built the dresser for the Darling family nursery! In retrospect, we’re not sure why we didn’t take a photo of the completed thing; that would have been pretty cool to show right about now.

Some updates for the week:

Set design: We’ve acquired DMX lights to use for the practical effects where Tinker Bell lands on various objects around the nursery. We’re in the process of programming them now and should have one to show off next week as part of our halves presentation. We built the aforementioned dresser. We determined what materials we’ll need to construct the set after halves and have a full design ready to go.

Programming:

We’ve made some massive strides towards successfully networking the HoloLenses together. We’ve verified we can see the same character art in the same location in at least two devices. Now we have to make sure they can handle the large amounts of animation data we’ll be throwing at them.

Digital Art/Animation:

The rigging of our Tink model is nearly complete. Next week, we’ll be highlighting the process that went into creating this rig and featuring our guest artist, Sahar Kausar, who is handling the rigging process for us. In the meantime, we’ve done some work on establishing Tink’s flight path and tweaking her model textures.

Rehearsals with our actors begin in just a few short weeks. Will we be ready for them? Stay tuned to find out!

 

 

This week, visiting scholar Anthony Daniels dropped in to have a look at what we’re working on. As a performer who has quite a bit of experience acting alongside imaginary/invisible co-stars, his input was invaluable as we attempt to translate these well-established film-acting principles to the stage. With our Peter and Wendy now officially cast, we’ll be meeting with our actors next week to get their measurements for costumes (naturally) and (less naturally) for the purpose of creating digital representations of them in our AR world.

Here’s what else has been happening this week:

Set Design – A formal ground plan of our set was drafted that places all of the set pieces/furniture in their intended locations. This will allow us to digitize the set as well, enabling the programming magic that powers the AR effects to happen. Additionally, we taped out the dimensions of our set/playing area in the actual theater space, which does wonders in making everything feel more real.

Programming – We’ve spent most of the week working on networking multiple HoloLenses together to ensure that more than one audience member can experience the performance at the same time. We looked at a sample project where two people wearing HoloLenses could inhabit the same AR world an interact with a few augmented objects. We’re now in the process of inserting our Tinker Bell into such a shared world and seeing how it looks.

Additionally, our project would be greatly aided by the ability of non-HoloLens wearers (both audience members and crew) to see what Tinker Bell is doing on stage. To that end, we’re looking into a solution called “Spectator View,” which essentially bolts a HoloLens to a DSLR camera and streams out to external monitors. Setting this up requires us to use a 3D printer to make some kind of mount piece, so that’s always a fun experiment. We’ll be getting this set up hopefully by next week. Take a look at this weird little rig in the meantime:

Script/Story – We completed rough storyboarding/actor blocking, and made some edits to the script that came out of that process. This will help both our cast members and the animation/programming process as they begin to place Tinker Bell in the world!

Animation – By Monday, we’ll have a completed rig of our Tinker Bell model that will be ready for some animating! Our crack animation team has been poring over reference videos and creating plans based off the storyboarding/blocking we created.

Next week we’ll have updates on our networking process, reports on meeting with our (human) actors (!), and preparations for our mid-semester halves presentation the following week.

 

And we’re off! With our choices of story and hardware decided, we’ve moved into the production phase of the project. Even for such a short scene, we have our work cut out for us over the next 9 or so weeks. Our first step was to develop a schedule for the remainder of the project that includes deadlines for set design, prop purchasing, load ins, and costumes. With those established, each department is able to move forward on their individual tasks.

Script/Story: We’ve been delving into the nursery scene from Peter Pan and deciding exactly which elements we want to include.

We intend to stay as close to the original Barrie text as possible, but we are making some cuts where we can to cut down on time as well as to keep the focus of the audience experience on the AR moments. With a play as iconic as Peter Pan, this has proved to be an interesting challenge—practically every line is iconic from this scene and its beats are well known by many potential audience members. Ideally, a balance will be achieved wherein the scene is the right length for our needs, puts the spotlight on Tinker Bell, and feels completely coherent and seamless to the audience.

Technology/Animation: Our programmers and animator established a pipeline for the workflow on this project, involving creating the animations in one piece of software, exporting it to the game engine that will actually run the show in the AR hardware, and then having it run on demand as cue-able mini-sequences. The “timeline” feature in Unity has been tested as the facilitator that will make all of this possible.

Set design: Our designers are in the final stages of drafting a full set schematic that displays the precise location of walls, furniture, and props. Pending approval of our formal budget, we will begin to acquire the actual items we’ll be using on stage and start to modify them for our effects.

Next week we move on to creating the storyboards that will place Tinker Bell in the scene, and allow the actual animating and positional coding to begin!