Quack Quarantine - The Tale of Quacklyn

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  Quacklyn - Stronger Together

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  Behind the Scenes (Spline)

Inspiration

In this project, we ventured beyond mere motion, weaving a narrative through the antics of a goose. This is not just any story; it's the genesis of Hack Quarantine (Hackathons UK's first event 👀), affectionately dubbed Quack Quarantine by our protagonist, Quacklyn. We follow the innovator and devisor of the concept - Quacklyn - exploring how the motivation for the need for Quack Quarantine developed, and how it singlehandedly changed the hackathon community forever. From this story, we take away the importance of collaboration and support to allow hackathon communities to thrive.

What it does

It is an animation rendering, in the imitation of an interactive children's picture book, that shares the tale of Quacklyn the same way we all, as children, learnt our most important lessons. It walks through various scenes, each which depict a pivotal moment in the storyline, narrated the very members of this team.

How we built it

The incredible visuals were manually derived from Spline (as opposed to Blender, which, though more powerful, has a larger learning curve for new beginners). The goose was made using a series of complex techniques, including first deriving a low poly version and progressively adding more divisions to add more intricate features. The dinos was made using a technique known as Gaussian splattering where we capture a 360-degree video of our objects to model each frame from differnt angels and allow spline to work its magic rasterization technique for a real-time 3D reconstruction of our dino model.

Then, a detailed poem was constructed to narrate the story alongside the animations, which also inspired the different scenes that constructed in spline to tie the storyline all together.

Challenges we ran into

Notable attempts were made to include a webcam feed to translate live human movements into animations that would get mapped onto the constructed models. The aim would be to create a human model (representing a character in our story) and speed up the animation pipeline, since it would mean that every single object of a model wouldn't have to be modelled with an event transition separately. This was done using the GUI provided by the freemocap module in python. However, this required a few manual reconfigurations, for example, the versions of dependencies being used, which caused a domino effect of features not working as they should. Specifically, the multicamera calibration caused issues due to an inability to synchronise the rates (the FPS), which then meant it was unable to successfully complete calibration, even when reducing down the number of cameras to 1, manually creating a text calibration file and increasing the charuco board size. All of these attempts were unfortunately futile. In some cases, it even failed to recognise any of the cameras.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Despite being a no-code project, it is equally as meaningful because it captures the true essence of hackathons!! In fact, none of us have ever done a no-code project before. It's also the first time any of us have used Spline or 3D animation at that (no easy feat!!)

What we learned

3D animation Being comfortable asking sponsors for help and taking the time to flesh out ideas with them a bit more thoroughly so they can guide us to success :)

What's next for Quack Quarantine - The Tale of Quacklyn

It should be noted that initially, the scope of this project was much much larger. The direction of the project was to build an interactive graphic visualisation of Karl numbers, where Karl would play a central role as "Mother Goose" and the graphic visualisation represents the Karl numbers of hackathon organisers, where each of the organisers he has worked with would be a gosling and as the interactive graph grows, the family of geese would grow. Precisely this growing family of geese was intended to be the animation for our project, however, this project turned out to require a different path for implementation that made combining it with the Spline renderings very difficult. Whilst it was not completed here, it can (and will) be completed as its separate own project. Just wanted to give it a shout-out here.

Important Note

All the work done in this project was done with the permission of Jacklyn Biggin - the innovator behind Hack Quarantine. For more information about Hack Quarantine, please visit https://hackquarantine.com/

Built With

• audacity
• canva
• freemocap
• gaussian-splatting
• imovie
• love
• spline