AR Posters

This workshop was developed by Michelle Brown for a Fun Palace activity 2019.

Acknowledgement

We acknowledge Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples and their continuing connection to land and as custodians of stories for millennia. We respectfully acknowledge the land on which we all meet today, and pay our respects to elders past, present and emerging.

Summary

Welcome to the Augmented Reality Poster Design workshop! Well be using free and open source software Krita to make our poster and animation.

Once we have an image (poster) and an animation file (mp4 or PNG image sequence) we can use one of the AR apps to host our experience.

Skills Introduced

Understanding of Augemented Reality

Basic poster design with Krita software

Basic animation design with Krita software

Workshop Walk through

Step 1

Making the Poster

The Edge Fab Lab laptops have Krita installed, open the Windows menu and navigate to the app under K.

Open up the app and we'll go through some basics, it's very similar to other design software like Photoshop.

Step 1 - design the poster

You can make a poster of whatever you like but have a think about how you want the poster to animate. Will you use text, shapes or characters? We only have 2 hours to create the design and animation so keep it simple so it's stress free.

Open Krita and make a custom template at A4 size but double the width, so 4960 width x 3508 height pixels.

We want to add some guides to the template so we know when we print, it will remain within an A4 boundary. Navigate to the View menu and make sure to select Show Rulers. This will bring up the rules on the side and top of the page, you can then click and drag from the ruler area to create a guide. Right side in 1240mm and the left side at 3720mm.

Make your design to fit within these borders. Think about how you want to incorporate the animation into the poster as this will make the Augmented Reality side of things look great!

You will need to make things on separate layers in case you want to animate any of your text or shapes.

Here's some examples; https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CqlWQ14pTUA

Step 2

Create the animation

We're going to use Krita to make the animation as well, navigate to the Window menu then the Workspace menus and choose Animation. This will bring up the animation timeline and we're going to just make individual keyframe animations using the duplicate keyframe option.

We also want to turn on the Onion Skin option so you can see the animated items in progress.

Once you're happy with your animation, we need to export as an MP4, on Windows you need to choose the Codec - C:\ffmpeg\bin\ffmpeg.exe

Step 3

AR Platform

One of the easiest existing AR platforms to use for creating artworks is Artivive. It has an easy to use web based platform for adding artwork and an app that works on IOS and Android devices.

We're going to use a staff account that has already been set up, login with the email michelle.brown@slq.qld.gov.au and you will be told the password during the workshop session.