What I Have Learned
My capstone class for my New Media Certificate has been by far the most challenging, educational, and genuinely fun class in my New Media journey.
This semester, I worked with a team to create innovative social media filters, evergreen Giphy stickers, and an educational resource for others to recreate what we made.
The technology we used pushed me out of my comfort zone. We used a program called Blender to create 3D models that we would use in our filters. The process of learning this program was a tedious and time-consuming one. The payoff was worth the long hours of trial and error. I can now say that I can build a 3D model of a retro computer.
After making the 3D model, the next challenge was figuring out how to put it into a filter that would live on social media.
To create the filters, we used a program called SparkAR. Meta owns SparkAR and therefore plays nicely with Instagram and Facebook as Meta also owns them.
SparkAR was tricky to navigate at first. There are a lot of elements that I did not explore during this project, but I will be returning to study later. We focused on three types of filters during this project.
- A 3D Animated Poster
- Utilizing target tracking technology
- A Real-Scale World Object
- Two Randomizer Filters
I will be talking about the projects that I lead.
3D Animated Poster
Out of all the projects we had, this filter had the most hours put into it. Many elements were challenging, and I had to do a lot of research to determine my problems.
Overall, I learned how to create a 3D model using Blender, import that model into a SparkAR filter, take a graphic that was made by a team member and import it into SparkAR, then take a video that was created by a team member and import that into our filter in a playable format.
One of the challenging aspects of this project was some of the small details. I now know how to add materials and textures to a SparkAR filter.
Real-Scale World Object
This filter was a lot of fun to create. Amid the chaos of the other filter, this filter was a breath of relief. However, we had to do some problem-solving first.
SparkAR can make 3D text, but it isn’t movable or scalable. To work around this, we had to make our 3D text in Blender. We then imported the text into SparkAR as a movable object. This allowed us to make the object, the 3D text, placable, rotatable, and scaleable.
Takeaways
This project taught me to “make something work and then make it work better.”
After each checkpoint, I couldn’t believe how far my team and myself had brought our project.
I learned a ton, from 3D modeling to AR filter creation, during this semester-long project. SLAM! was such a fantastic experience. Presenting all the work my team spent so many hours on was gratifying. This process, from start to finish, was one of the most enjoyable ones in my college career.
