50th Anniversary of Apollo 11 Snapchat Lens

Back in June 2019, Snapchat sent out a call for creation for "The 50th Anniversary of Apollo 11" aka landing on the moon. I love NASA, space, and space history so I decided I'd take a crack at building some lenses for this call for creation.

Out of the swirl of ideas I had, I knew that I had to incorporate a Saturn V rocket taking off, and the other Apollo crafts.

Apollo Crafts Lens

This lens I wanted to be more educational than the Saturn V one, I wanted to show off all of the vital crafts it took to get to the moon along with some summary or history next to them. I also wanted to use Behavior and Tween systems, which if I remember correctly were fairly new at the time.

The major constraint of this lens was the 4MB limit. I wanted to have as many crafts as possible but had to settle for 3: the Command and Service Module (CSM), the Lunar Excursion Module (LEM), and the Saturn V rocket. The final lens ended up being 3.98 MB, just a hair under the size limit.

Here is a video of the final lens:

The lens operation on the surface was simple:

1. Start with a craft
2. User taps to cycle to the next craft/stage
3. The craft lowers into the ground, the Apollo mission emblem closes
4. The Apollo mission emblem opens, and the next craft emerges, putting us at the next stage
5. Repeat

To handle the movement of crafts up and down I used tweens. The door opening and closing model and animation was made in blender. The craft 3D models were sourced online, either from NASA themselves or other 3D model listing sites. If I remember correctly some decimation was done in blender to get the lens small enough to submit.

All of the craft/stage handling was done with a script I wrote with help from some other Lens Studio scripters. The script handles when to open and close the door, when to raise and lower the crafts, removing and adding the crafts, and the onscreen info text changes between stages.

Here is a video of the lens in action at NASA Johnson Space Center in Houston:

Here is the snapcode if you want to try the lens yourself:

Saturn V Lens

Because the maximum lens size was only 4MB at the time I had to create the Saturn V lens separately from the crafts. While I do have the Saturn V in the Apollo crafts lens, it does not do anything special.

Here is are a few videos of it at NASA Johnson Space Center in Houston:

This lens operates by looking for a NASA marker, once the marker is found it maps the camera texture of the marker onto a circle that opens up to reveal a Saturn V rocket. Once the door is open, the Saturn V is tweened out of its silo, starts producing smoke, and is ready to launch. The launch is another tween that shoots it straight out of the logo, which then closes and resets for the next rocket.

Here is the snapcode if you want to try this lens yourself, all you need is the NASA logo. If you have a friend's phone you can use their phone with the lens open as a NASA marker for your rocket to emerge from.

Lens Fest 2019 Award

At Snapchat's Lens Fest 2019, an annual event they hold for their Augmented Reality creators, I won the award for Best Call for Creation Lens with "Saturn V".

You can read more about the awards and events here.