Ekoo is a remote 3D design platform for the game industry
Time
May - Aug 2021
Industry
Game Industry
Members
Haoran Xu, Zoe Zhang, Duoning Zhen, Cynthia Lee
Role
Product Designer, Gesture Control Prototyper
Game
Companies
Office
Remote 3D Character pipeline is broken...
Animators who design 3D characters animation cannot visualize, understand, and organize the annotation from teams due to the online limits.
How might we build a more effective multi-disciplinary collaboration tool in order to improve the creative cooperation for remote design teams in the game industry?
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the interviews
After a few rounds of interviewing designers and stakeholders in several major game companies, I found out the pain points were close to our secondary research.
Hard to collaborate with many apps
Collaboration on animation contains both real-time and asynchronous scenarios.
Lack of remote working tools
Lack of a professional tool designed for the collaboration on animation on the market.
talk remotely makes misunderstood
Collaborating online creates more misunderstanding to the collaboration on the animation.
hard to Document feedback
According to designers skills and habits, everyone have different way of giving annotation.
problem
Animation teams are having a hard time to see the same picture within 3D assets remotely, which leads to a lot of back and forth process and crunch time.
target user
Therefore, our target user will be concentrate on mainly three characters in the industry. Which is Art Director, Concept Designer and Animator.
Introducing EKOO
The real time 3D character pipeline tool
1.Real time collab
2.Easy to control
3.Fast iteration
What is EKOO.
The best remote collaboration tool for animation pipeline.
01
opportunity
Imagine how you, as the art director, could describe this animation accurately to your designers so that there would be fewer misunderstandings.
If we use just words and simple gestures to describe an animation, 100 people will come up with 100 different visuals in their heads
Game Design Document
The game design document platform organizes the animation assets, annotations, and team collaborations. All in one, with no need to worry about moving files and documents between apps and losing them.
Uploading and sharing the asset with your team with status and tags that communicate the status and the needs for the asset clearly.
upload jobs
Easily checking the peer feedbacks on the page, including the sketch, posture, and note, which tells you exactly how to modify the assets.
browsing feedback
02
opportunity
How you organize feedbacks from different people and make sure the team can all catch up with each other's ideas?
Imagine you as the designer, after receiving these sketches from the art director, you have a total of 10 different feedbacks now.
editor Annotation
Annotating beyond text, you can make annotations by sketching on 3D modal, adjusting the posture of the character, and spotting the note in a specific location in space.
Make an annotation by simply using the pen tool to draw over the character, like an art director does when they give feedback in person.
sketch annotation
Can’t sketch? Annotating by simply dragging the head, arms, and legs of the character to communicate your desired posture.
posture annotation
Examples are important. Pick a place on the character, and annotate with an image of your preferred pose into the note with text description.
note annotation
key iterations
USERFLOW
How Game Design Document, Editor Annotation and Gesture Control are connected.
Gesture Control Library
Without a mouse? Try hand gesture control, which is an easy and intuitive way to interact with the model.
the future
We envision annotation with hand gesture control in synchronous working scenarios for more intuitive interaction with 3D space in the future of EKOO.
However, due to time limitations, we have only experimented with a few options that require further evaluation. If I had more time, I would schedule more usability studies to evaluate my concepts.
the impact
EKOO will not only solve the problems of people working during the pandemic, but also enable more collaborative process in the game industry and transform the way how people work and design the 3D space.
what i learn
How to use data to drive design decisions
During design process, I need to ask myself questions such as “ who, what, when, how” from the data collected. The team iterate the feature and experience according to user insights in an agile way.
Being empathic with users and their pain points
In this project, I enjoy thinking the product holistically and listening to the users’ experience, feedbacks, and being an active listener.
It helps me understand the users’ pain points and create empathy with them.
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