Our assignment this week was to start gathering items that spoke to us and forming a narrative out of them, working towards our final Cornell Box.
I was home this week for Thanksgiving, so I decided to raid my childhood bedroom and see what was there. So many of these items hold strong memories for me, all from distinct time periods of my life: from elementary school to college to just last year. Putting them all together in a desk drawer formed a special kind of chaos. Here’s a photo of it on my floor to illustrate:
I decided I wanted to utilize some of these artifacts in my final project, and began to imagine my Cornell box as an actual junk drawer filled with memories and artifacts. They’d be arranged in a ‘tasteful mess’, and the player would be able to pick up objects in a semi-specific order and interact with them. A narrative could be formed with the commentary and history these objects provide.
The problem was, I needed a way to get my items back to New York without actually physically bringing back all this junk, and my suitcase was already stuffed as is. So I decided to try Polycam, a 3D scanner app that I’ve seen people use on social media to capture remarkably accurate models of everyday items.
There are two main modes to Polycam, LiDAR (which is better for 3D modeling big spaces) and Photo (which takes a collection of photos and cloud-computes a model of a small object). I tried it on an old stuffed animal I had, and was really impressed with the results.
Examples of photo captures I took
Examples of photo captures I took
The final product!
After trying with a few other objects, I found that the technology worked better in some cases than others. For example, I thought a simple box pencil case would be simple enough to capture, but the app somehow botched it pretty egregiously.
The images
The final product 🤦♀️
Overall, I learned taking a lot of pictures and capturing them from many angles was key for this app. At the end of my visit, I was able to capture the likelihood of a variety of different objects overall.
I think it would be really cool to import these objects into Unity, although they’ll need some cleaning up. Next week I look forward to trying to export these into 3D software and bringing them to life in Unity.