AR Space Monkey

I wanted to test out image target tracking in Unity and decided to reuse the Captain Ellen art assets from my PS4 theme. Setting up AR Foundation and getting it to work with the Universal Pipeline definitely had a lot of easily missed checkboxes and dependencies that aren't super obvious, but once it was working I was pretty happy.

Unity's post processing and lighting is also a step up from the rendering engine options that were available on the PS4 themes, so I was definitely pleased at how everything looked with just a bit of tweaking, and I added in emission maps, and a smoke effect. Something that I wasn't able to add to the original theme.

Since I was also modifying the files in Blender I decided to put everything together and do a few renders with eevee since I haven't done that before, and I also taught myself how to use DaVinci Resolve to edit together the video. I'm pretty proud of the "security camera" cut I did, because I liked the ambiance of that scene but the original render broke the 180 rule and lighting was off from the subsequent shots and I didn't want to re-render it, so I thought I'd learn a bit of the color grading features of DaVinchi (since it's known for it's flexibility) and since I had already over committed, I dove into the VFX nodes to add in some motion graphics and scripted the camera's timestamp (which you can only see for 3 seconds). Overall a pretty fun weekend project.