Fall Leaves

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  Fall Leaves

Inspiration

The inspiration came from the central idea of using a particle system base for the effect. Since this is my first effect I've created, I wanted to keep it simple. With that thought, I figured a theme would be nice, and since fall is coming and we likely won't be outside as much as usual - I chose to bring the fall leaves inside.

What it does

The effect itself is a few simple particle systems that either: a. are always on.. b. are on but get modified when the mouthOpeness variable is >= .35. c. turn visible when the mouthOpeness variable is >= .35.

How I built it

The effect heavily leaned on some tutorials, though I did branch off a little bit when I wanted to occlude the leaves to give depth to the scene. I always really wanted to actually use scripting instead of the node-based graph since I am a computer science student.

Challenges I ran into

For sure the biggest challenges I ran into was encountering the reactive programming paradigm. As I noted about, I am a CS student and have never really dealt with event based programming aside from signal catching in *nix OS. This was frustrating but also fun to dig into. The next challenge I ran into was occlusion. I used the head occuler and midwifed the shape to get the results I wanted but I'm positive there was a better way of accomplishing the occlusion. You live you learn.

Accomplishments that I'm proud of

I'm most proud of just finishing. Often times I (and many others) start things without completing them. I wanted to see this one through since the subject matter is something I'm very interested in.

What I learned

I learned about the reactive programing paradigm as well as dipping my feet into sparkAR engine. It was quite easy to learn since I use the Unity3D game engine quite a bit.

What's next for Fall Leaves

Two things. I would like to get smarter about the leave occlusion and I would like to introduce more of a blowing in the wind type reaction to the particles.

Built With

• ios
• javascript
• sparkar