My Role: 3D modeling and animation
My client for this project, Guru Experience, was setting up an augmented reality element for a museum client of theirs. They requested some animated models for use in Unity: a sheet of parchment on which the words of a poem would appear and a quill pen that would move along the text as if writing. The writing would need to match up with a sound clip of the poem being read aloud.
The poem text and the sound clip were provided by Guru.
I started with an image of the text as we wanted it to appear on the page. Then I traced the text roughly using Blender’s grease pencil tool, set the grease pencil lines to appear gradually, and timed them with the sound clip. That allowed me to use the traced letters as an image mask to make the text in the image appear over time. I then composited in some parchment texture and rendered the whole thing out as a video.
I also created a simple parchment model that the video could be mapped onto.
After that, I built a quill pen model and used the traced lines as an approximate path for it to follow. I also gave the quill some extra movement to make it look natural, as though someone was writing with it. Because I used the same track I had used to create the text video, the quill’s animation would line up correctly with the text when brought into Unity.
