This project was made for an Immersive Media class at Drexel University.  The goal was to create an interactive Snapchat filter and to publish it online.  My filter was a shy turtle, that would dance until you walked up to it.  Once you walked up to it, it would pop back inside its shell.  Above are the initial sketches I pitched for the idea.

From there, within one week I modeled, textured, animated, and rendered out the turtle.  Snapchat posed a unique challenge since it has a very small data cap of 4 MB, with a recommendation of 2 MB.  It also had to be under 10,000 tris, with less tris running faster.  Because of all of this, I went with a very low poly aesthetic, and the texture was very low resolution.

I modeled and animated the turtle in Maya 2018, and textured it in Mudbox.  The animation consists of three parts:  the idle animation, the trigger, and the active animation.  The idle would play while the user was far away.  Once the player approached within a certain preset radius, the trigger animation would play, and from then on, the active animation would play.  The animation had to be baked onto the skeleton in order to be taken into SnapStudio, Snapchat’s tool for creators.

From there, it was some simple coding in SnapStudio, and an upload to their servers.  Within 24 hours, the lens had a snapcode, and is now able to be downloaded onto your phone.  All you have to do is scan the code below, and you’ll be able to use it for 24 hours.  It doesn’t work on lower model phones though.

This project definitely taught me how to work with small data limits.  I had only modeled for pre-modeled animations before this, so it was interesting to go the low poly route, and to make low resolution textures.