Wheres Goldbug
11 Dec 2019 - Jake Sherwood
Where’s Goldbug - AR story telling
Intro to AR with Unity - Where’s Goldbug
The concept for our Unity project was to dd a AR story telling element to one of my son’s favorite books, Cars and Trucks and things that go.
Throughout the story there is a hidden character, Goldbug. He is hidden in every scene and sometimes very very well hidden.
I thought it would be a fun added experience to have Goldbug come to life when reading the story with jackson.
The idea was to have multiple image targets, one for each of Goldbug’s hiding places. When you hove the phone over where he was hiding he would come to life in augmented reality.
I was able to find a 3d model of Goldbug, from grabcad.com, and I used mixamo.com to rig up a few animations.
The only problem was getting the materials added. Basically I had to redo the UV mapping. The UV map that came with the model was a mess. Something like 64k shapes and none of the 3d modeling apps I had could properly map a material to it.
I ended up using the Photoshop 3d environment to simplify the mesh. Once a reduce the shapes I was able to properly color it and apply my materials in Unity.
With the model sorted we turned to the actual functionality of the app.
I had a working prototype of a single image target and plane finder.
My partner was working on adding more image targets and adding a collision feature that would make the plane finder animation disappear on collision.
We had some versioning issues trying to get the files merged back together so we weren’t able to complete the full concept.
But I was able compile the single image target and plane finder to my phone via Xcode and it was fun to test out with Jackson.
Where’s Goldbug AR prototype app