Art Realization Tool

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  Main Menu

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  Studio

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  Gallery

Inspiration

After hearing the theme for TigerHacks described in the opening ceremony, we knew that we wanted to make something that allows the user to create. We brainstormed about music creation, visual art, and even 2 dimensional art like painting. After some thinking, we figured that designing art in 3 dimensional space would be much cooler.

What it does

When you start the program, you're faced with a sculpture (made in the game) and two options: Create and Gallery. If you select create, you're transported to the studio. Surrounded by trees, and calming nature sounds, you can now create anything you like with the different tools provided by A.R.T.. After you finish your masterpiece, you can save it to the disk and head over to the gallery. In the gallery, you can view all of you works of art in a refined, luxurious setting.

How we built it

We used Unity3d as the game engine, and programmed everything in C#. All work saved to the disk is made up of serialized floats (lots of them).

Challenges we ran into

Two of the biggest challenges were 3d line drawing and saving data to the disk. The line drawing is a very resource intensive process, so we had to find some ways to optimize the process. Saving data was challenging because Unity does not let you serialize many non-primitive data types. We instead had to break these down to their most basic forms when they were saved, and build them back up when they were loaded.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Because of the challenges they presented, we are most proud of getting the line rendering and the save data system to work properly. Allowing the user to paint lines in 3d space was a game changer for this project. We're also very proud of how the project turned out visually. We didn't plan on polishing the scenes very much, but we decided to spend some time on doing so near the end.

What we learned

First and foremost, serialization. Getting everything to save and load iteratively taught us a lot about how games and other applications save and load persistent data. This project also sharpened our C# knowledge, as we had to employ many object oriented concepts to make things work efficiently and still be readable.

What's next for Art Realization Tool

We want to expand the brushes. Beyond giving the users more tools to create with, we also want them to be able to import custom meshes to draw with as well. In the same vein, we also would like the user to have more line shapes and sizes to choose from. We would also like to implement a way to open sculptures back up for editing, as we did not have time to make this a reality.

Built With

• c#
• unity