Just started to write this weeks blog and realised I didn’t post last weeks!
This is a very bad photograph of a drawing I started on Friday. I missed most of the week as I was away for a few days. So all I had time to do was hide the gaps in the installation and give it an extra coat of paint.
This is an equally bad video of the installation in its current state.
The video shows the work I did on the virtual environment last week. I reordered the layout of the gardens and made a pathway from one drawn garden to the other. I altered the 3d model of the new garden, with the splashes, to use high poly models in unity for a better finish. It still needs work and more coherence. I’m thinking now of having alternative routes through the space and denying the ability to return.
building the new installation
This is Monday morning’s work on the new installation set up. By the end of the day all the panels are up, the next stage is to paint it all and attach the screen to the bar at the back. The idea is that the viewer enters the space, explores the alcoves (which will be sculptural) with the video projected to the back as before, and can then leave the space through the video, replicating the experience in the VR world. I’m also building a model of the studio so that is the space you begin in and then you view the installation in VR as in life but passing through the video takes you to the new spaces.
On Thursday I painted the new installation with an undercoat and worked on the VR world, but only after bailing out the buckets on the top floors.
I tried out making a photographic garden with all the planes mapped as videos, I don’t have the processing power.
I had to remove the videos because of the continuous glitching.
After Thursday the VR space looks like this…
The positive thing about the experience on Thursday is that it helped me resolve an idea for the arrangement of the gardens. I’m now thinking of four gardens, possibly arranged seasonally, which gives me a target for the modelling and textures I need to make.
This week has been about rebuilding and thinking. I’ve decided not to attend the VR section of the Aesthetica Short Film Festival, even though its just up the road in York, because I don’t want to get over influenced by anything I might see. Equally I’m not at all interested in FPS or general RPGs. I think I need to solve the problems I have now rather than find new problems to further cloud the issues I encounter.
One of the key things I found during my open events was that the piece lacks coherence for an audience, there is no target so there is nothing that guides a user through the navigation. If you’re not going anywhere in particular it’s difficult to know which way to go, or what to be drawn towards.
The list of things I need to do begins with the rebuilding of the installation and the need to make textures for the VR environment. I began by taking the space apart this week.
Installation piled up in the studio
I then laid out the new arrangement and cut some wedges to position the panels on Monday.
New installation layout
It doesn’t seem a lot to have achieved in a week.
Alongside this I did some work on the VR space but won’t have video showing the changes until next week.