Modeling
| Snow Globe Environment
Two versions of the snow globe were created, one for usage in the Unity3D interactive engine and the other one for Maya animated demos for 3D interaction prototyping. The globe on the above, the Maya version was modeled with a wooden base, terrain and populating elements.
| Tertiary Details
Other assets such as rocks grass and trees were modeling as a means to flesh out the backdrop of the winter wonderland environment. Here I went for the low poly aesthetic as you can see I purposely triangulated these simple meshes then hardened the normals to created the blocky look. I did this as well because if it were to be imported into the Unity interactive engine I wanted to be cognizant of performance and therefore keep the poly count at a reasonable amount.
| Final Composition
I began to distribute all the elements across the environment utilizing mash to paint the vegetation geometry on the surface along with manual placing other assets.
With the environment complete, I then began to model elements specific to each of the three feature areas. The screenshots above are elements from the Jewelry Enclave with interactive holiday bulbs. I created them in a separate environment and then imported them in to the main scene.
| 3D UI Icons
3D Icons were created on Maya from SVGs exported from Adobe illustrator and Flaticon graphics database. These were generated for usage in some of the virtual user interfaces with the user selects products in this virtual environment.
| 3D Avatar + Clothing
In actual practice avatar in Dressing Room will be generated by the system procedurally however for the sake of this prototype, I 3D modeled a human subject to utilize for demonstration purposes. Here you see a close up of the head along with the body hair, eyes, teeth and mouth.
I knew I wanted the prototype to feature clothing try-on so I modeling and sculpted clothing for this avatar for the Dressing Room widget in the app. In actual practice, clothing will be created as a result of 3D scanning or some other product capturing method by the retailer.
The try-on portion of the app also included accessories and footwear so a select few of these were modeled as well for demonstration.
Surfacing
Inside of Maya I created shaders with Redshift 3rd party render engine to surface the environment and assets. The above screenshots showcase some of the shaders I created along with the layered shading networked with Fresnel I created for the snow filled ground landscape. Most of the textures I created were procedural colors or textures already in the 3D package with a few outside textures that I sourced from my texture library or hand painted in other 3D texturing packages.
| Environment
Here is a perspective view of the fully textured landscape. on the overall globe I utilized a ramp and on many of the scene elements I imported as Redshift proxies which read the textural information from another scene but in the master scene 3D work view they appear white. Other assets, I did not create proxies for which will appear in their intended colors for render such as the stylized snow filled pine trees.
This is a close up example of the procedurally textured tree along with the layered texture landscape that appear greyscale in perspective view yet the render will reveal it's blended surfacing.
| Avatar + Clothing
Besides texturing the landscape, I hand painted many of the 3D textures associated with the avatar and the clothing after sculpting these asses in Zbrush. I then went about generating vary types of maps such as specular, albedo, normal and more. The above screen shot displays just a few of these maps I created for the avatar and fashion articles for the demo.
Animation
There were quite of few moving parts and elements to be animated in this scene and character and a few of such work progressions are illustrated above to give an idea of my process.
The first screen shot showcases a herd of wandering reindeer that I first animated singularly then put into mash to animated along a conformally mapped curve on the landscape's geometry surface. The next screenshot demonstrates the footwear midway circulations along with the dynamics I configured for the falling snow in the globe. The third screen shot displays another dynamics simulation I created to demonstrate the hearts particle simulation after a user shot and favorited merchandise.
During the animation process, I heavily made usage of set driven keys from which I created custom animation sliders. Such is the case in the 3D UI interface platform above part of which I utilized for the Jewelry Enclave's animation at the ending sequence.
A separate scene was also created for the experimental 3D UI to showcase the user's ability to navigate in this virtual pop-up show with controller free hand gestures to either teleport or take a guided walk to any one of the 3 zones inside of the snow globe featuring promotional merchandise.
