The First Attempt at making a Virtual Library
Our capstone teacher, John Anderson believes that every aspect of the world will eventually be accessible from the web, including vast stretches of the wilderness, so he tasked us to come up with a way to bring his future a little closer.
The sample asset we worked on was a White (Pacific) Sturgeon, modeled, rigged, textured and animated by me.
We were given a semester to concept how to do this, and our first result ended up looking like a version of Wikipedia with 3D assets you'd be able to play with. Everything would be interlinked, i.e. a bone necklace 3D model (3D scans of tribal artifacts are now frequently done by some native american communities) might lead you to a page about the type of fish it was made from. Overall we hoped to make a useful, yet intimate database.
We showed this to some members of the Couer D'alene tribe, who said that we were missing the context of the environment around the animals, which inspired our actual capstone project, the Arboretum.
A nice render of my white sturgeon model, as they'd look if you were interacting with them in VR.
The basic format for how we'd set up our assets in the database.
Every asset we created would be linked together by a web, showing their species to species interactions.
You would be able to access each creature's Environment, Biology and some details of its Culture. Culture would be highly subjective, with us requesting data from many groups, indigenous and non indigenous.
A sample of a man-made asset in the database, and how it might lead you to an animal in our database.
Upon arriving at this asset, you'd be able to see all sorts of data points that could lead you to other pages.
A basic render of my Sturgeon Model before I got him swimming. Here you can see his gills moving and him doing the creepy sturgeon mouth thing.
A swim animation of my sturgeon. This specific one is designed to look about 6 feet long, the fish himself would probably be about 26 years old. Fun Sturgeon fact: They can live to be 100!