Feedback

During our presentation to our client, we received feedback on our layout. First of all, our gear review section was more of a gear introduction section, so we need to rephrase our words. We should also state that it is gears used by the featured artist and specify that our pages are meant for beginners who do not know much about gears. The client also found our pages confusing since the featured artist page and the gear review pages dont relate with each other, so Mr. Razif suggested that we rearrange our pages.

Adding subtitles to our videos

Since the featured artist speaks in English in our videos, we decided to have Malay subtitles to make it easier to view for Malaysians. Using Maisarah's Malay translation, I added subtitles to the video introducing the Esteve guitar. Here it is:

https://www.dropbox.com/sh/6p2k6oxtma3t46d/AAAMeHcv1LuDQFmxjfa-Z-iLa/vids

Compiling and adding interactivity

After Amir finished his design of the gear review pages, I compiled all the files into Adobe InDesign. Here is one of the pages of our gear review section:

I worked on adding the interactivity for each page. When tapping on the first button, it plays a video of the featured artist introducing the gear shown.

Next is the 3d button. When tapped, it shows the 3d models we made of the guitars and pedals used by the featured artist. To do this, I made 2 object states, one with opacity 0 and the other with opacity 100. Then I used the slideshow button in the folio overlay panel. After that, the 3d model is added using the 'image sequence' button. One of the difficulties in making this button work is that the size of the 3d models was too small so all the models had to be re-rendered in Maya. Another problem is the background of the models could not be transparent because the image sequence button does not work with .png images, so the models had to be rendered with a gray background. 

The music button plays an audio sample of the gear. I managed to make the audio play when tapped on, but the problem was that it could not be paused. This was fixed by putting two images in an 'audio asset' folder:

Then the options are changed in the folio overlay panel and the audio can now be played and paused.

Interactivity in the cover page and contents page was also added so that it automatically jumps to a certain page when tapped on. This was done by creating a button and adding an 'action' to it.

Adding sound clips to 3d model

One of our interactive features for the gear review page is that 3d models will play sound clips when tapped on. This is the outcome:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=clQKcMsgfCk

Importing 3d objects to indesign (attempt 2)

In our 2nd attempt of adding 3d objects to indesign, we resorted to using the 'image sequence' function on InDesign. To do this, we have to batch render from Autodesk Maya. The downsides of this is that the model can only rotate left and right, not up and down. This is our outcome:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HjZ-84Ve2L0

Importing 3d objects to indesign (attempt 1)

InDesign cannot directly import a 3d object. Therefore, I attempted several different ways to add it into indesign.

In our 1st attempt, I found this tutorial that says you would need Adobe Acrobat Pro Extended to import 3d files, then convert them to PDF. However, Acrobat Pro does not support Autodesk Maya (.mb) files, which is the software we use for 3d modelling. I found out that the only file types Acrobat supports are .u3d and .prc

So to import our model into Acrobat, we converted the .mb file to a object file (.obj) and imported it into MeshLab in order to convert it to .u3d

I tried this by using Maisarah's model of the Bad Monkey pedal. Our problem was that many of the textures were not visible is MeshLab and ended up looking like this:

So, when we imported the .u3d file into Acrobat, it was also missing textures. Since we were unsure of how to fix this issue, we resorted to using a different method.

3d model classical guitar - complete

This is the final 3d outcome of the classical guitar: