Inspiration
I was inspired by projects showcase on the spark ar official website. For Jungle Friends I was inspired by the love of nature and how animals are friendly and joyous around people who love them. People and kids normally who aren't as fond with animals are scared of them hence they cannot pose with a real animal around or on them. Hence I used the capability of AR to bring that experience virtually
What it does
This world effect brings your friends from the Jungle to you! A cute baby Elephant dances on your ground and a happy monkey on your head which poses when you say cheese!
How I built it
I downloaded some models from the internet. Rigged the monkey and animated it from mixamo. However the Elephant wasn't rigged or animated, it was just like a static model.I used photoshop to create textures for the models. I used blender to modify the mesh and rig the elephant and animated the elephant to dance. I placed the Elephant and birds on a Plane Tracker so that elephant can share a common ground with the person trying to have a picture or video with it and the birds chirp and fly around above the elephant. I used head and bust occluder to place the monkey on the user. I used person segmentation to have occlusion with elephant, birds and monkey. Added some audio effects for fun and immersion.
Challenges I ran into
The animation and rigging of a static model was a bit of challenge as I did not have much of experience in doing so.. I spend around half a day in learning and animating the elephant for the desired dance animation.
The Monkey was previously placed on shoulders However the Head occluder occludes only a round part as shape of head hence the person looked as if they were bald. So I used person segmentation to avoid that problem. But This gave rise to another issue, now the monkey looked it was placed behind you instead of looking like sitting on your collar. I asked a query related to this on the Community page that is there a way to make a custom shaped mask around the person segmentation mask, But wasn't solved so I placed the Monkey on the head instead.
Well this was my First project on SparkAr thus it was a little tedious to get hang of the patch editor. Spark AR crashed a lot by the end of the project.
Accomplishments that I'm proud of
I'm proud that I learnt SparkAR, it's a very powerful tool for developing AR filters however some modifications are still needed. I'm proud to complete my first project as a part of this Hackathon. I am also happy to learn blender and animation in it.
What I learned
- Spark AR
- Blender and animation
- Using Patch editor
What's next for Jungle Friends
Jungle Friends can have variety of animal friends as an option picker for user to select an animal that shares their ground. It can expect alot of users with their kids enjoying their pictures with their animal buddies.
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