Project 4 - Marching Band AR

After exploring basic AR for a research task and being inspired to use it i came up with idea of making your own half time show marching band. By placing cards down the different instruments in the band would appear and when the conductor was placed the band would animate and start playing.

So the first thing i did was spend some time designing and creating the cards for the characters. I decided to use a water colour style on the cards and ended up painting the backgrounds by hand and drawing the instruments on with POSCA pens.

Next thing i moved onto was the models, i started with a base model holding nothing with his arms down by his sides, i made him red with gold trim like the common uniform of marching bands in America. Once i created the base model i just opened the file added a different instrument and saved it separately without overwriting the base model. The models are all faceless and are only two voxels thick i felt this have them an interesting depth and gave me more room to play with when designing the instruments.

After the models were done i followed my Vuforia tutorial which is here on my blog to make the models show up on the cards in unity, before they would show up i had a fair bit of setting up to do and once that was done it was good to go.

Hilariously i ran into some problems in my setup after explicitly saying in my own tutorial that you have to check the data sets boxes and activate before it will work and wracked by brain for a few days before Steve saved me and finally i was back on track.

This game is still a work in progress and i'm not even sure of the direction i want to take it, i thought about the possibility of making it a rhythm game like Guitar Hero where you place out the cards and have tracks with notes coming down behind them and turn the cards into virtual buttons to press when the notes are in the right area, animating the model and playing an extra sound flourish. This may be something that will fall by the wayside with Make - A - Thing coming up which will take up all of my focus but if i can come up with a way that is not overly complicated and inconvenient to a player to integrate AR then i would really like to give it a shot.