Mountain Water Love
PROJECT OVERVIEW
Brief:
Mountain Water Love is a short film that aims to convert a Chinese traditional water-ink painting style animation into a virtual reality experience. You can experience Mountain Water Love in 360 video on YouTube (by clicking the video above) or play it in Oculus Rift which was this project originally developed for. You can download the playable binary for Oculus here.
Duration: 8 weeks
Tool: Unity, TiltBrush, Oculus Rift
Team:
Rui An (developer)
Ke Lu (developer)
Mingze Xiao (developer)
Xiaoteng Yang (developer)
Qiuji Zhao (Designer)
My Role:
As the designer of the team, my job is to draw the characters with tilt brush, design all the scenes with unity & MeshLab and design the website for the whole project. The whole working pipeline involves Python, Blender, MeshLab and Unity. We wrote a step by step tutorial of using our convertor to generate 3D water-ink style models in here under section "About".
DEMO
MOTIVATION
Instead of creating another VR game, we wanted to create something more artistic and story telling related. There, we came up with the idea of integrating traditional Chinese cultural elements into VR technology and then came the birth of this work: Virtual realitization of a traditional Chinese water-ink animation -- 山水情.
The basic idea of this project is to convert a Chinese traditional water-ink painting style animation into a virtual reality experience. The problem is obvious, all the techniques we know about water-ink painting can only be utilized in a 2d setting, how can we apply them in a 3d space?
The basic idea of this project is to convert a Chinese traditional water-ink painting style animation into a virtual reality experience. The problem is obvious, all the techniques we know about water-ink painting can only be utilized in a 2d setting, how can we apply them in a 3d space?
After some diggings, we found several papers in non-photorealistic rendering that we think maybe helpful for our project. And later, we narrowed it down to one paper published by Korea University and decided to use the mathematic model described in that paper to implement our convertor. Here is the link to the paper.
The aim of the convertor is to render 3d models into a water-ink(Su-Muk) painting style with users’ guide. We implemented our convertor with python. The idea is to simulate the behavior of water-ink directly on 3d models so that after our simulation, ink and water will be spread over the surface appropriately.
The aim of the convertor is to render 3d models into a water-ink(Su-Muk) painting style with users’ guide. We implemented our convertor with python. The idea is to simulate the behavior of water-ink directly on 3d models so that after our simulation, ink and water will be spread over the surface appropriately.