The classroom scene is the second in this "first day of school" series and although it is fairly short, I hope to illustrate something both poignant and subtle. Marcus feels out of place because this school and environment is totally foreign to him. Also, he's the only person of color in the room. What I hope to capture is how his confidence is quickly eroded after not being called on by the teacher. Below is the instruction sheet I prepared for Jeremy.
Similar to the bus scene, I pulled everything together in Unity first. I created the teacher and kids (also from the bus scene) in Fuse and placed them where I wanted them to go.
Once I had things where I felt they should be, I packaged the scene up in Unity and sent it over to Sean for a bit of touch up. Mainly, I wanted the class room to feel a little more cluttered and "lived in" so Sean added backpacks, books and stuff around the walls. He also export a very simple model for Jeremy to use in Maya. After all of the issues we had with the Bus scene, I determined that Sean should just create very basic prop environments for Jeremy to work from. As long as the scale and placement of objects was the same, it should be fine for his animations. Here is the setting Jeremy received from Sean.
While working on this scene, I began thinking about the VR viewer and whether or not to keep them stationary. My initial thinking was to keep the viewer stationary in the back of the classroom, but then I wanted the viewer to see the kids faces as well. Below are a few different screengrabs as I tried to figure this out. Ultimately, I think I'm going to have the viewer start at the front of the class and slowly float around to Marcus' side.
A few things I have to clean up are the scaling issues. As you may notice, the backpacks and chairs are a little large for the kids. All of this fine tuning will be done in Unity though.
This particular scene proved to be a little challenging for Jeremy. Initially he had the teacher walking across the room, but the motions were unrealistic. Also, because I wanted to experiment with moving the camera from the front of the class to the side, I had him move the teacher's mouth a bit, but the bone structure in the face is a bit off. Again, this is early animation work (that needs some refinement) but it gives a sense of what we're after with this scene.
This first test has the teacher walking across the classroom. I didn't like the way the teacher moved, so I had Jeremy keep her more stationary. Also, I didn't want he moving too close to the VR viewer.