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CAPYBARA
SET//
The Capybara productivity set is designed to be spatially anchored in users’ space, the set consists of three features, weather, focus timer, and meeting reminder.
Timeline
3D modeling, UI design, 3D animation, prototyping
Role
Feb - Mar 2024
Project goal
This is an assignment I had from XR bootcamp, the assignment is broken down into two parts, the first part is to recreate my own room in 3d and the second part is to create spatially anchored 3d interactive widgets and transform my room to improve productivity/entertainment/well-being.
Weather
For the weather feature, weather information is displayed by the hour for the day and current location, the capybara character show the current weather.
Showcase
Focus timer
For the focus timer, the user can set their own work and relax time, the user also can pause the timer at any time, the capybara character shows the current status.
Reminder
For the meeting calendar and meeting reminder, the user can see what meeting they have, and set how many minutes before meeting they want to be reminded.
For the first part of the assignment, the requirement is to create no less than 10 assets and ensure the total number of vertices is under 100K. To recreate my room, I took photos of my room from different angles, and to recreate the assets such as the bed, chest of drawers, and nigh-stand I found reference photos of the exact furniture online so that I can see photos from different angles and accurately recreate them.
To keep the total number of vertices below 100K, for the Ikea armchair and sconce, I found the 3d models online, to reduce the polygon count I decimated the models in Blender, and for the 3d assets I created myself, I tried to be aware of the polygon count while I create them and keep as low poly as possible without compromising the look too much.
Link to 3d model on SketchFab: https://skfb.ly/oRJFo
Building room
Ideation
For the second part of the assignment, I chose productivity, and came up with the weather, focus timer, and reminder features, because these are features I need most in my daily life, right now I pretty much rely on Alexa to tell me the weather, set timers and remind me before meetings, but it could be quite tedious to ask every single time when I need things from Alexa, so I thought perhaps I could come up with 3d widgets and spatially anchor them in my room, so that I could be productive.
Capybara charecter
Mood-board
I chose capybara as the character since they give people the impression of being laid back, so I thought to make capybara productive is kind of fun, because it’s a contrast to their natural personality. I found reference images of the real capybara and cartoon capybara so that I can study them, I want to keep features that are typical to capybara and make the character look cute at the same time by simplifying some of the features.
Sketch
Because I want to create the capybara in 3d, I sketched out the character in 3 angles: 45 degree, front and side, so that I can bring it into Blender and use the images as reference.
Build & animate in Blender
Having reference images makes it easier to model in 3d, I sculpt the character in Blender and decimate the body parts as needed to make the file size smaller, for the accessories I can find that will fit nicely with the character, like glasses and the umbrella, I downloaded from SketchFab, and for other assets that I couldn’t find, I created my own assets such as earphone, rain boots, scarf, etc.
After I created the character and the accessories, I animated the character in Blender, for the animations, I wanted to keep them simple and subtle to fit with Capybara’s character, I then baked the animations so that I could export the character with animation.
For the UI, I studied other weather, focus timer, and calendar/reminder apps, to design something functional. For the visual style, I want to keep it simple and optimized for mixed reality, so that they not invasive and will fit well in any space. At the same time, I made sure the UI design looked nice with the capybara character, by using colors that are harmonious together and rounded shaped components.
Create UI in Figma
After I created my room, capybara 3d models, and the UI in Figma, I imported them into Bezi, because Bezi enables animation to play and it’s relatively easy to prototype. I had a bit of difficulty at first finding the best-performing file type and experimented with materials (some faces show as inverted in Bezi so I had to flip them in Blender, some materials look different in Bezi). To light the scene, I added point lights where the light sources are, added directional light to represent natural outdoor light, and chose an HDRI background that fits well with the scene.
Link to Bezi prototype: https://www.bezi.com/play/db0b8329-4be2-46c7-b243-bcc46cf3b8d7
Prototype in Bezi
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