Bill was away this lesson so Matt took the class, regardless I wanted to get something projected on the wall to give me some indiciation of what it would look like. So I ended up projecting both a still of the megalith and an animation of the tree growing.
The projector was old and horrible and didn't do the image any justice, but the projecting surface and lighting conditions of the E-Media computer lab aren't really a conducive projection environment. Another problem was I couldn't make the projection fill the entire wall and thus did not achieve the scale I was hoping for.
From this test projection I've ascertained I'll definitely need an overhead projection to allow the viewer to get as close. Matt suggested I could try rear projecting but I'll need a fair amount of space to make this work.
The tree growing animation was well recieved, however I was concerned that it looked too shoddy because I didn't know what I was doing when I started. Because of this I've got the leaves and branches growing in several differt "styles" some of which defy nature - but nobody seemed to notice and were impressed by what I had done.
We discussed the interaction and what would happen to this tree when someone stopped interacting with it. My first thought was to have the leaves fall off the tree and fade into nothing before they hit the ground. However, I used the "Loop Back & Forth" option in QuickTime so the tree constantly gret and "un-grew" which the class found quite meditative and rythymic. So perhaps I'll explore "ungrowing" rather than "deciduating" because it will be far less complex and quicker to implement.
It also occurred to me I could just as easily create this tree growing animation in Flash rather than in After Affects then importing it into Flash. Creating it entirely in Flash would give me greater control over what happens as I could use Action Scripting down to the very leaves.
Now my next step is to get this tree growing in Flash under certain mouse states (I.e. mouse down, mouse up), then build the mouse a censor and do a test install.
Friday, May 25, 2007
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1 comment:
Awsome. Sounds like some good ideas. Your growing tree looks great. Though, will there be interaction with the wind? Who knows..hehee.
-Phil
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