As I was brainstorming possible concept directions for this project, I have kept in the back of my mind that it would be interesting to explore otherworldly/extraterrestrial scenes to incorporate into real life scenes as augmented elements. I felt the strongest passion towards creating an alien-themed AR scene, in which grotesque figures and mannequins would fly around and create an atmosphere comparable to planets such as mars.
I started out my modeling my very first alien on the iPad app called Nomad Sculpt. This app allows me to create more organic shapes and structure, which aligned perfectly with the visual direction I was hoping to achieve. This alien embodies a very stereotypical image of extraterrestrial creatures, and I’ve created the form based off no reference images, just my pure imagination and memory of how aliens are portrayed in media such as movies. Once I’ve polished the edges and merged the voxels of the meshes so that the mannequin stays in one continuous form, I saved the file as an obj to export it to my PC.
Afterwards, I’ve went ahead and modeled more aliens of greater variation. I particularly made use of the lathe feature on the app that allowed me to create uniquely shaped limbs. Again, as I was modeling based off my pure imagination, I was able to explore the freedom of creativity; I did not feel restrained to any kind of “model image” of what an alien should look like, which ended up leading to a more natural and experimental look of these creatures.
As decorative additions to the AR environment, I modeled a couple more icons and otherworldly objects. The first is a plant-like substance that will stem off of the ground with shiny, metallic materials, and the second is a model I made based off a reference image of a UFO. These additions help the scene be a little less visually boring, and it also helps with the overall storytelling and world building of the scene. Thanks to these elements, the AR scene will give a more extraterrestrial vibe.
Next, I attempted to texture the elements on Blender. I’ve noticed, however, that the colors and materials would not fully transfer to Adobe Aero at the end. The problem was strictly when I’ve uploaded the characters with other elements (decorative additions) in the same scene. When I try to upload the character alone, the material transfers perfectly fine. I’ve assumed that this was a crash on Adobe Aero, as it is still a Beta version, and there are more difficulties I face as I try to proceed with the presentation of this project.
Next, I try attempting to upload my characters onto Mixamo to create some motion and animation on my scene. After uploading the obj file of my alien creatures, I had to manually go through a simple rigging process, in which I identified the locations of the chin, arm, wrist, and leg to the program so that it would recognize my character.
As shown in the videos, I played around with various motions and movements on the aliens to perfectly replicate that feeling of other-wordly, grotesque, and gravity-less environment. I’ve exported all of the files into an fbx format, which carried the motion data of the animation when importing such elements into the Adobe Aero scene.
I’ve started uploading files onto Adobe Aero to create the augmented environment. I textured each element one by one and gave it a metallic material to reflect light off of the surface.
Here is where I faced my challenge with Adobe Aero: as I’ve starting elements and objects one by one into the scene, I found the application to start glitching. The program slowed down and lagged quite a bit, and I had to restart the scene a couple of times to make the elements all safely uploaded to the scene. My guess is that my laptop is not yet ready to handle all the computing power that this AR scene requires, as I tried to upload the other two aliens in the scene (which have presumably a huge amount of data stored in the file), the program kept shutting down on me. However, I did manage to get one alien into the scene without crashing. To compensate, I added animations to the organic objects as well as the UFO to make the whole scene more lively and interactive.
This is my final documentation of the project. Though Adobe Aero only let me include one alien (and in white materials only,too), it was adorable to see all the animations in motion. I truly think that the scene replicated a sense of otherwordliness, and I was mesmerized even upon watching the scene through my phone how good the rendering quality offered by Aero was.