Fourth Part of the Music Video
It is the last day and so far I have somehow pulled it all together and actually made a VR Music Video.
Since last I wrote I have felt more in direction than before and just went for it.
During the whole process, which in my case was quite intensly random I have kept my will to make something more stylish rather than extremly avangard and overcomplicated, but it turned out that it is a bit harder than I firstly anticipated and even the simplest idea can get tricky to execute.
I needed that reality check in order to find out for myself what I am capable of making as my first ever Unity made VR project. And once that realization came somehow it became much easier to work on the MV.
I focused on working with what I had made prior (exept the Terrain, that was too detailed for VR and I honestly never liked it in general).
In the very first two weeks after finding out that we have to make a music video I came up with a pretty concept for a nostalgic and in this time of my life relatable song by Glukoza and have made two weeks worth of work in Maya with frosted glass buildings and blue lights, looked into the particle system for snow and felt quite good and confident, but after coming back to Moscow and opening Maya just to find all of the work severely deformed to the point of no rescue I dropped the ball and no longer felt the same urge. But anyway continued making buildings exept with no sense of purpose.
I have learnt not to work on a big scene in Maya if then I am planning to export it into Unity.
So at one point I have decided to switch up the song and try making the best looking MV that I could in that tine frame (aprox. 2 weeks before due). And thankfully it turned out.
I have used keyframe animation, modeling and sculpting in Maya, dipped into Materials in Unity, found a handy dandy bug in unity which lets you use rigitbody as a collider for complicated high poly mesh ( I avoided using mesh collider in all other cases)
Through the process of trial and error and look dev I learned more than if I were to make one project from the beginning and Maya crushing just pushed me to think on my toes even though it felt stressful at the time.
If it was not for constant search of inpiration on my side I would have been clueless.
Gorillaz is one of my favourite bands both sound and aesthetic vise. So I looked through their music videos and revisited the 2000s to 20016th feeling and found it quite helpful for the lighting and general visual input forscene look dev. Also I can not forget the one and only big dawg Snoopy D O double G his voice and energy also brought a lot of feelings and potential creative input.
Welcome to the World of the Plastic Beach is still a relevant song 11 years after coming out. Pollution of the ocean, televising the revolution ( technological growth but how I interpret it a circus that politics has become with the gain of social media (I feel like I don’t have to point out the elephant in the room like facebook and intsagram and the data it stole from users)). Those problems, especially the last one are mainly what I think about on day to day basis. And the concept of creating a plastic beach had every right to exist even in a less metaphorical way (trash islands, waste dumps, great pasific garbage patch etc.) but rather have a newfound attraction to the people of 2021 with its potential to actually exist in the world and be attractive to people.
As far as my execution of the idea goes, I could have done a much better job of portraying the plastic beach and spent more time on detailazing the scene as well as having more action on there, but to be frank even though I would most likely revisit it in the future to finish and polish it, for the feeling of emptiness and rediculusness of the plastic beach my models actually kind of work out.
Lastly what I want to adress is the technical difficulties I have run into besides Maya scene deformation. For some reason my computer and the Quest 2 headset are not a match made in heaven so my double usb c cord would not connect my headset to the computer, but through a usb to usb c cord it pairs up but the connection is poor as well so I could not test the scene in VR which is a vital part of the project, though when I tried running it, it showed no errors so my guess is it is probably the cord that needs to be switched out or perhaps tested on on another computer, I mights build and run it though first to check.