Concept
Building upon our story from Project 3, we had one goal: bring the Trojan Game Day experience to life!
Since Adobe Aero allows users to easily display AR on their phones, we felt that having a miniature, gamified version of Trojan football in our pocket would be a fun way of keeping the Trojan spirit alive. To accomplish our goal, we amalgamated Tommy Trojan, a football, the USC Marching Band and the Song Girls against the backdrop of the USC Coliseum in our AR environment.
First, the user scans their student ID to launch the virtual space. We decided to use a USC student ID as our environment’s anchor because we wanted to convey how getting into the game day spirit with all your friends is a pivotal part of the USC college experience.
As the user clicks on Tommy Trojan, the football spins through the air in the trajectory of a parabola. Once the touchdown is scored, a panel screaming “GET LOUD” appears in the air. Upon clicking on the panel, an audio clip of the USC Marching Band plays, whilst the Trojan Marching Band (TMB) and Song Girl mannequins are triggered to begin dancing.
Process
As a team, we brainstormed our concept together before working on singular elements individually and, then, putting our objects together to form one cohesive scene. Please find a breakdown of our process below:
- Took videos of ourselves performing the iconic TMB and Song Girl dances.
2. Imported these videos into Rokoko and Plask for motion capture.
3. Imported our downloaded .fbx files into Blender for 3D modelling modifications. For example, Mavis was able to source a TMB headpiece combined with sunglasses from Sketchfab.
4. Experimented with Mixamo’s in-built animations to rig our Trojan player.
5. Created the Coliseum floor and “get loud” panel designs in Figma, before downloading as .png files and inserting them as our backdrop in the Adobe Aero environment.
6. After all the .fbx and .png files had been imported into Aero, it was time to set up the triggers…
a. Tap(trigger) on the Tommy Trojan to launch the football.
b. Tap(trigger) on the “GET LOUD” panel to launch TMB and Song Girl dancing as well as an audio clip.
7. Finally, we anchored the whole environment onto a scan of the USC student ID card.
Challenge
Initially, we wanted to use Plask for our motion capture, because the software allows users to animate (with their personalised recordings) mannequins that have been previously modified on Blender rather than only the in-built mannequins from the Plask software database. However, we encountered trouble with uploading our recorded video onto Plask (they get stuck at 99% forever 🙁 ), so we decided to switch to Rokoko for our motion capture and to experiment with some of Mixamo’s pre-set animations for our TMB mannequin. (Since we want to keep our customized mannequin and Rokoko doesn’t support the import, we chose to import the Mixamo dancing animation in the final Aero.)
Additionally, Aero did not have a function for allowing an object to move in a parabola trajectory, so Mavis expertly implemented three pins that follow the path of a parabola to guide the flight of the football.
Upon running our Song Girl video through Rokoko, we realised one of our challenges was ensuring that the iconic Trojan victory sign was clearly visible, as the software found it difficult to capture smaller elements in full detail. To work around this, we used the sculpt tool in Blender to manually reshape the hand of our mannequin to look more like the victory sign. If we had more time, we would learn how to re-rig bones on our mannequin so that we could directly control the mobility of the mannequin’s fingers.
Reflections/Learnings
Overall, we both enjoyed how this project encouraged us to creatively amalgamate the 3D modelling, motion capture and AR environment-building skills that we have gained in the past few weeks to craft a whimsical world that holds meaning for us. We also appreciated the opportunity to think through solutions for the challenges we faced, even if our solutions were not the most sophisticated or elegant. If we had more time, we would learn how to animate mannequins in Blender through more accurately rigging the skeletal structure of our mannequins.