Creating Assets for XR

I think my imagination is a bit larger than my skillset at the moment. This week’s project proved more challenging than I’d anticipated.

I chose to work with a logo that I’ve developed for another project. I thought it would be fun to see it in action however the end result is way less dramatic and tech-savvy than I was hoping (sigh). I started out imported a few AI files and extruding the logo. The first hurdle I came to was hollowing out one of the triangles. It took me quite some time to find the inner extrude element.

At first, I just wanted to animate the logo itself but I changed course and decided to play with the Rigid Body and Collider aspects. I was inspired by Mark’s use of the landscape feature so decided to add that in. I found a ‘rock’ texture that I downloaded and applied to the landscape feature. Unfortunately when I went to render it said there was an asset error. In the end, it was a miscommunication of file-structure so I had to manually drag/drop the texture mapping into the materials panel. Nothing a little Googling couldn’t fix, but certainly a setback.

I found myself revisiting the class lectures and RJ’s videos to apply the physics of gravity to the elements. At first, I didn’t realize that I need to also make the landscape a Rigid Body so that was a minor hurdle. It took a bit of tweaking and patience to get the effects I wanted, but we got there.

Lastly, when I added the typographic logo and extruded the elements it didn’t accurately represent the font. As you can see the letters P and A are missing interior gaps. I couldn’t quite figure out the reasoning behind this issue and honestly didn’t dig too deep.

Exporting and preparing the FBX file was where I ran into the most trouble. I didn’t realize that I had to drop all the elements into a single Null before building the Dope-Sheet and keyframes. I exported multiple times and each time something seemed to be missing — whether it was the camera keyframes or an entire animated element. Finally, I seemed to get everything out in one piece and imported it into Adobe Aero. The desktop beta model isn’t great if I’m being honest. It crashed multiple times on my laptop and desktop computer. I lost patience and decided not to continue playing around with Aero because it continuously crashed without saving progress so I was starting over from scratch each time.

I ended up adding a few geometric elements and animating a cloud. What I noticed was that the camera keyframes I added in Cinema4D did not carry over into Aero. I’m not sure if this is normal, but I couldn’t seem to figure out how to manipulate the viewpoint. Alas, the end result certainly wasn’t what I had in mind but getting some more practice and understanding of Cinema4D was helpful and encouraging.