This scene represents the first glimpse into the main character Marcus' life. It's his first day of grammar school and as his guardian angel, you witness some key moments in this young life. What I hope to accomplish in this collection of scenes is a nostalgic view of what it truly is like to be a kid. We often reflect on our childhood with fond memories, but in many cases, being a kid was actually hard.
Putting this first scene together was quite a challenge. Sean models using 3D Studio Max, Jeremy animates in Maya and I pull everything together in Unity. The biggest problem we faced was how to work on the same scene in our respective programs. Ultimately, I was able to give Sean a Unity package which he could open and import into 3DS Max. However, this didn't work for Jeremy and Maya. So, the workaround was to provide Jeremy with very basic environments and I would write out detailed instructions with screenshots from Unity. (see below)
The scene started with me pulling together various assets in Unity, including the School Bus model. I then exported the Unity package for Sean, who modified the scene a bit further. For example, the doors on the bus were closed on the original asset, but he opened them. He also had to create new seats for the interior of the buss so there was more space for the characters to move through.
Unity screengrab with my notes regarding the missing ground materials
One of the biggest issues we've encountered was keeping the assets at their original scale values. It's been hard to transfer characters and props through three different programs and maintain the proper scale. I created a scale reference for Sean, to try to help with this.
Inside Maya Marcus is teeny tiny
The kids imported into Unity as chubby Oompa Loompas!
Another challenge with this scene is determining where to place the VR viewer. Because the viewer is a very tall angelic figure, the bus is fairly tight in terms of the interior. I'm still trying to figure out the best solution, but these are a few tests to determine the viewer height.
After about a week and a half of sending multiple files back-and-forth, I finally determined that Jeremy could just work independently in Maya on the animations and I will import the characters into Unity and place them where they need to go. So far, this seems to be the way forward. Below is an animation test from Jeremy for the Bus scene. It's still very rough, but progress nonetheless.
The School Bus scene is still in active production, but once the animation and models were delivered, I had the guys start working on the Classroom scene.