Spring 2016 Thesis Wrap-Up
I was a Journalism and Interactive Multimedia double major at The College of New Jersey from 2012- 2016. I was also the president of the Student Film Union for two years. It was those little films that gave way to a deep passion for story-telling. I’m a writer by trade but since coming to college I’ve immersed myself in other outlets of story-telling. After graduation I pursued a career in animation and video editing with NJ Advance Media and helping to build up their multimedia department.
The spring IMM showcase is an event that grants seniors the opportunities to show off their thesis projects for families, fellow students, and potential employers. It’s a wonderful time to see what types of projects the IMM seniors come up with and to admire the amount of work are put into these projects. I transferred into the IMM department my sophomore year after leaving Biology and the spring showcase was one of the reasons I became so interested in this department. There were so many different types of projects ranging from web applications, physical computing, graphic design, films, and animation. I felt so inspired after leaving my first showcase and couldn’t wait until I was presenting my own project.
My senior thesis project, which I titled Cyphus 0–47 the night before the showcase, was a sci-fi virtual reality film that showcased my passion in environment modeling. Users were able to take a tour of four fully-rendered 3D environments while being guided by an automated interface service. Although the camera was scripted through the environments, users were still able to retain 360 motion of vision.
Being more of an artist than a developer, I found that actually modeling my project environments was an enjoyable experience that I could complete with little to no stress. I spent the fall semester solidifying concept art and hammering out details of the story. But when it came time to import my 3D-rendered environments into Unreal Engine (which was my platform of choice) I started realizing how intricate the VR process really was. Similar to animation and film, I found out that an incredible amount of work goes into a few simple things. Eventually I had to abandon Unreal Engine and switch over to Unity because of the impending deadline and the availability of the software on the school computers. There were also issues with importing my assets into Unity and then scripting a camera for it, because I model predominantly in Cinema 4D instead of Maya, it made it more difficult to keep the textures with it. Because I ran into problems early on, I developed a backup plan to have a video showcasing my project just in case I couldn’t get the VR component of my project running for the actual showcase but that soon presenting problems for render times. On average, each scene took between 10–14 hours to render at the quality I wanted it to be at, which is unreasonable if I had to render 6–8 scenes. So I had to cut render qualities to compensate for the deadline (eventually I’ll get a high powered computer to render out my project properly). In the end I had to screen a looping video of my project but it still gained a lot of traffic and positive feedback.
If I had to start my project over and do things differently, I would start user testing sooner and spend more time focusing on aspects of my project I wasn’t as comfortable working in (i.e coding in Unity and Unreal) instead of paying more attention to things I knew how to do (modeling and texturing). I would also stick to a stricter schedule with my project, I got caught up with filming for Campus Moviefest around the same time and put thesis on the back-burner for almost three weeks (I won, though. So it wasn’t a complete lost). I would also have a solidified concept and direction of your project BEFORE the spring semester because nothing is worse than trying to be creative under a short deadline and not fully fleshing out your ideas.
Below is some of my early concept art for my project done during the fall semester of thesis:
