Brainstorming and Project Presentation. 

After visiting the Wardsend Cemetery in Sheffield and talking to Howard and Hugh, we had more information to start planning the project. We started making notes on the train back to London and agreed to meet in the next few days to discuss the idea further.

As not everyone from our group was able to go to Sheffield, we created an online photo album where we shared all Sheffield photographs.

We also set up a Trello workspace for the project where we are going to gather information, a work plan, useful links, notes, and other resources. We also agreed that we need a version control tool for the project. Luckily, Will is comfortable with GitHub and set it up for us. I have started working with GitHub only recently, and even though my experience with this web-based platform is not big yet, I can clearly understand why it is an industry standard. It allows teams of people to work on the project without worrying about the versions, changes etc. It obviously requires some level of knowledge and practice.

We then met to start the actual work on the project. After discussing the idea for the VR experience we are to produce and agreeing on the technical and visual aspects of it, we had to present this concept to our clients – Howard and Amanda. 

Meanwhile, we also had to assign specific roles in the project to people in the group. There are tasks and stages of the production involving us all, but clear work division was a key; so, everyone knows what to work on between our group consultations.

I am a 3d modeller, along with my two other colleagues. I was responsible for cutting the painting we are working with into separate layers with specific elements in each layer, such as people, buildings, trees, gravestones, chapel, train, river etc. This was a time-consuming process as the painting is rich in content and incredibly detailed. I used Gnu Manipulation Image Program 2.10.30 (GIMP) for this task and shared the ready file online with the rest of my group. Cutting the image into layers generated a large file as it was a raw, not compressed image; also, the highest possible quality was needed.

Every person had their first, mainly research task assigned before we met our clients for the presentation of the project.

On the presentation day, Billy, as one of the project directors, presented our idea to the clients. The whole group took part in that meeting. We answered the questions, but also asked a few. Overall, we were given a green light for the concept we had presented. Our idea for this VR experience is to create a simple gallery-like room with the painting on the wall which becomes alive and immerses the viewer into the scene painted by Edward Price. There will be 3D models, animations, and visual and sound effects. All the elements need to be put together, scripted accordingly, and checked if everything looks and works properly. The experience will be built in the Unity engine and run (probably) on Quest 2.

At the presentation we asked our clients, inter alia, about the train that appears in the painting. It was important to know if they preferred to have an accurate 3D model as close as possible to the actual train that ran there in the past or if a generic train from the era was something they would have in mind. Our clients decided to have a consultation on that topic and get back to us with relevant information and reference images of the train they would want us to include in the experience. In practice, that meant that this task was on hold, and I should have focused on other models. It was decided that I should start looking into people’s figures in the painting and model some of them. I jumped straight on this task (amongst a million different things I was doing at the same time).