People for the project. 

My third big task for the Wardsend Cemetery VR project was to start working on people models. As a group we agreed that there is no need to create humanoid models from scratch. Therefore, I started with a software called Make Human that we used briefly in year one of our degree. After a female model I was working on was ready, I imported it to Maya to create clothes for it. When this part was finished, I sent the package to Unity. Unfortunately, most of the textures weren’t imported. My attempt to fix it was unsuccessful.  

After several various attempts, still without the right outcome, I decided to leave that model as it is, without all the original textures but with an option to assign materials (colours) to its elements in Unity. 

At the same time, after talking to the group and to our course leader, Annie, I searched for an appropriate to our project human people on Mixamo, an online platform with a small range of rigged people characters and simple animations users can choose from.  

I found a male character wearing a suit. This model would work well for the painting experience should we change the colour of his outfit to beige/sand, as all male characters appearing in the art piece we are working with, wear suits in that hue. I added this and another male character in casual clothes suitable for our project to the file so at that point we had two male 3D models ready. It is worth mentioning that all the people in the painting are on an extremely small scale, and to see their details a decent close-up is needed.  

The project we are developing includes several 3D models of people from the painting, both female and male. While getting the man model ready was quite straightforward, it was not that easy with the woman, mainly due to the type of the outfit characters in the painting wear. Long, big skirts or dresses, triangle scarves over shoulders and bonnets on their heads are not elements appearing too often in 3D models, thus I worked in Maya to model needed pieces of clothing.  

I applied the outfit I made on the two female characters. The first one, was mentioned earlier the Make Human woman model, and the second one was a character I chose from Mixamo. They both looked decent enough for our painting scene in VR. 

Due to the earlier issues with importing textures to Unity, I knew that it might happen again, and it did. It looked like Unity was not able to import all textures and materials when models were coming from Autodesk Maya. It was a bit annoying but not crucial at that time. I knew that we could simply assign the right shades of coloured materials to the objects (cloths in this case) in Unity. 

All models were uploaded to our Sheffield-Graveyard GitHub repository as .fbx files (3D models) so they became available to be used in the scene we are to create. It was an enjoyable task, but as it usually is, I was surprised by unforeseen complications.