An experiment in Augmented Reality

Getting weird (to learn some new tech)

If you've watched any episodes of The Last of Us on HBO you've probably seen the unsettling mouth fungus from the infected. I was fascinated by this as it wasn't in the game, and it was a novel (and disturbing) visual.

I wanted to try replicating it in 3d, but didn't know how to share it. The thought occurred to me that I'd never tried to make an Augmented Reality effect before, so I did some research.

Meta Spark Studio

It turns out Meta has a powerful (and a little buggy) product meant for exactly this. As it turns out it seems to be related to Origami Studio, another tool from Meta that I'm quite experienced in (as I've made a YouTube series to teach it).

How it's made

Fundamentally it's pretty simple. One of the first things I looked into in Spark Studio was its ability to procedurally animate skeletons from imported 3d files. Because of that I knew I wouldn't need to animate anything in Blender at all (my choice of 3d software). As long as it had a skeleton, I could procedurally manipulate several "tendrils" according to input.

I did a quick prototype to test this out with 1 simple tendril and basic skeleton. My first test was a success, and so I went back to make a more complex tendril with more points of articulation, and also thin hair like follicles.

After that it was a matter of instancing it out in Spark Studio, altering each tendril a bit, but still retaining some of their motions to maintain the "hive mind" effect of it all.

Overall it was about one workday putting it all together. It's gross, weird, and I'm pretty proud of it.