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Project Neverland | Carnegie Mellon University
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Role
Technical Animator
Rigging Artist
Client
Carnegie Mellon University
Platform
Microsoft HoloLens (AR)
Themed Entertainment
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Tools
Autodesk Software
Unity Engine
My Contributions
  1. Addressed the needs of animation and story to understand their vision and provide a rig.
  2. Created a bi-pedal fairy rig with wings from scratch inspired by Tinker Bell.
  3. Optimized the rig to be game engine friendly and fully-scalable within Unity.
  4. Helped export animation data from Maya to import into Unity for further implementation.
  5. Supported animation by adjusting weights for exaggerated animation and creating custom attributes.
Project Overview
  1. Project Neverland is an exploration project focusing on the use of augmented reality in live performance. In collaboration with the Carnegie Mellon University School of Drama, the team adapted an existing story to the stage featuring a fully-realized animated character that performs alongside a human actor. 
     
  2. The team chose to stage part of the famous opening scene of Peter Pan because it features the character Tinker Bell, a magical fairy who, alongside Peter Pan, visits the Darling family in Edwardian London before flying off to Neverland. In most stage productions, Tinker Bell is portrayed by a small pinpoint spotlight that shakes around as she “speaks,” and flutters along the stage on a two-dimensional axis. The advent of AR gave us the opportunity to make this character more believable than ever before. For the first time in a stage performance of Peter Pan, Tinker Bell is fully three dimensional (with an actual body and face!) and can fly around the nursery, zooming behind as well as in and out of various objects. She expresses herself clearly with body language and requires significantly less suspension of disbelief to accept her as a living, breathing character. 
     
  3. The end result is a short performance piece as proof of concept for AR’s expanding applications in the entertainment industry.
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