Idea:
When the user shows this hand drawn x symbol to the screen, which is often seen when the console shows an error in your code, a coding syntax character will appear. Associated with each character is a little blurb about the syntax and some helpful reminders when using it. This AR piece is intended to be a educational tool and hopefully a momentary relief from the troubleshooting process of coding.
Below are some videos that show how this piece would work.
Curly Brackets character rendered in HD.
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Process:
1.) Sketches of the idea, which changed significantly from the original concept that used the 3d text. Instead of having 3d text over the image tracker that said “Class not making any sense?”, there would be a 3d character of a syntax character. Below are some sketches of various characters I was hoping to model.
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2.) Next was modeling the character in Cinema4d. I am happy I got a chance to use this program, but I am still familiarizing myself with it. So this step took a little longer than I had hoped. Nonetheless, it was fun and I was able to model my character. Below are some screenshots of this process.
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3.) Simultaneously, I was following along with the roll a ball unity tutorial (see video below). This was so helpful and helped me a lot. Most importantly, it was good to see that it was possible to do text. However, this would prove harder than expected to get text to animate.
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4.) I then wrote script for the character.
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5.) Next was animating the text. I attempted many different things to try to get animated text. It was easy to get text, but I wanted to create a animated dialogue, so that each line would appear one at a time.
Steps I tried:
a.) I tried the TextMeshPro and followed along with a tutorial: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xfo0NrLJe_k
b.) I even got this TextFx animation plugin and wrote the script for it by following along with this tutorial: https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=36&v=I1ZGTID995A, but I still couldn’t get it to work.
c.) Also, found this tutorial online (https://unity3d.com/learn/tutorials/topics/user-interface-ui/ui-text?playlist=17111), which was helpful to know the capabilities of Unity, but still didn’t help me achieve the animated dialogue text that I was looking for.
Eventually, I decided to just use 3d text and just have the dialogue be in a short paragraph.
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6.) Next step will be to do another 2 characters. This is still in progress. Plan to update this blog with the results soon!