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Case studies and state of the art.

I have been researching state of the art and what current developers have for VR, I Haven’t been able to play all of them as of yet but I have been watching/reading a review for all of them and for those, I couldn’t afford in money and time I watched lets players only to try to find interesting perspective interactions and perspective shifts. I was disappointed that a lot of these games layout their perspective and most don’t change the character’s perspective and if they do it is only as a brief edge case.

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Bonsai Tree: 1

So I started to plan out my VR experience for Virtual Spaces and have decided to explore the art of Bonsai. Creating a miniature tree that the users will be able to manipulate whilst learning about the tools and techniques used in creating living art. I could also use it as a way to teach the history of bonsai as it moved from china to japan to all across the world and how it became synonyms with zen Buddhism. possibly also touching on famous individuals like Makoto Azuma, Yuji Yoshimura, Kunio Kobayashi, Akanori Aiba.

Bonsai is seemed to be quite a rabbit hole of complexity where creating a truly fatal reaeration of bonsai is seemingly infeasible as it’s important to remember that a tree is a living thing and they are incredibly complex. So I have to watch out for feature creep as the idealistic vision I might have for a VR bonsai simulation won’t be achievable in the few months I have for the project aspectual considering this will be my first dive into unity interactions and scripting. So I have listed out mechanics and features I think would be cool to have and listed them in order of importance and relevance. Some features like being able to see the tree grow will prove to be incredibly challenging for me but we love the challenge.

  • Branch Bending
  • Branch Wire
  • Branch clippers
  • leaf sheers
  • Temperature
  • Real-time growing
  • Seasonal changes
  • Dead bark
  • customer pots
  • Root rake
  • Root cutting
  • Decoration
  • History and meditation lessons (getting over it with Bennett Foddy style)
  • Plant grafting

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Studio Ghibli

Lately, I have been on a bit of a binge having re-watched some of Hayao Miyazaki’s Films. I’ve taken great interest in his films use of movement and detail, particularly in their environments. I went through movies like Princess Mononoke, when the wind rises, Porco Rosso and cut together moments of motion in its environment. this could be grass blowing in the wind, fire, water and other environments.

I had a go at following a couple tutorials to come up with some procedural grass texture using noise. this prevented a tiling effect but as from above and at a distance as the grass strands become less defined the texture of the noise becomes more defined. After watching a procedural rock texture tutorial I took its use of volanoid node that creates a more painterly pattern than the blurry noise did before it.

wave node adds wind effect by animating its phase offset. This is getting me closer to the look I am aiming to create. now to build it in unity or unreal and play around with game engine optimisation. Implementing view port culling and angle culling as well as an un-culling horizon and edge detection in order to maintain the grasses silhouettes on the horison

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Here We Go Again.

Contextual & Theoretical Studies and Virtual Spaces

So after wrapping up are previous 2 projects and after a week break for reading and watching plenty of youtube. we now have 2 new projects to get on with.

Contextual & Theoretical Studies

For Contextual & Theoretical Studies we have started to look deeper into the state of the art and what is currently presently being adopted into the industry. by looking at papers and articles submitted on sites like ACM Digital Library & Research Gate. I will be writing an essay for this unit “A portfolio of writing that connects practise with theory and research and demonstrates a clear understanding of the key themes addressed in the unit lectures 1,600 words” as these last couple of weeks I had a number of ideas that I would love to write about in my essay these being.

  1. VR overlays and multiprogram communication in VR and VRm minigames/metagames
  2. Will the wider adoption of VR by the public lead to less effective VR in therapy How much experience with VR effects bias influence.
  3. Does increase detail in games lower the development of imagination
  4. Anonymity how it changes behaviour and if it differs in VR
  5. 2nd persons place in VR narrative and perspective position

I narrowed my decision down to idea 1 and 5 as the other seemed to be more objective research-based questions that would be better explored in technical papers. I leaning more towards writing about the 2nd person as I have already thought intensively about this beforehand after playing “Moss” about a year ago. as much as overlay games like Portable Farm interest me there aren’t many examples outside of that game and its a rather new concept that I would prefer to revisit later where I want to get 2nd person out of the way as there is a lot of variety in VR perspective.

Virtual Space

somethings I take seriously but rarely is it myself and my work. So I might have to work with a few loopholes when creating my serious VR interactive experience for my Virtual Spaces unit.

I started to surround myself with serious topics to try and spark some inspiration tracking creating the Padlet above to try to figure out my approach 1st watching some Vice documentaries on world affairs and issues. I then realised although it is imperative that these issues be explored, Billy Beeson aged 22 is not that person and even after just reading about these issues a smidge I’m already emotionally exhausted.

So looking elsewhere Wendover productions had a lot of inspiring videos on the world environment and economics. I had a brief time working as a bin guy over one summer an exuberance that has made me think about waste and where it ends up. however, coming up with a serious and engaging way to dispose of trash altho plausible seemed unlikely. It could be fun in an arcade genre where you cleaning up a beach or working a recycling plant conveyer belt in order to build up points multipliers to reach s new high score.

Then after looking into social and personal issues through the lens of Healthy Gamer. gg I tried a different approach looking at serious games and the kind of interactions I would like to create. In the hopes of using game design and mechanics to tell the story. Dwelling on things like the polarisation of thought and the enforcement of extreme opinion. It would be possible to address these through game mechanics alone and wouldn’t need to be heavy-handed in its message, where you could teach the player through the game mechanics alone where the goal is to balance two extremes and avoid the extremes of 2 outcomes. I like the idea of creating a game with only a loose state or a game the lends itself to speedrunning.

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Youtube Channels for Online Learning

During the reading week, I spent most of my time searching the internet for learning resources on YouTube. I’ll probably send this post around to other students if they are as interested in these folks as I am. I recommend making a separate youtube channel that you use just for educational content. this should help tame YouTubes distracting algorithm that aims to distract you. Also remember “doing” is a far more effective way of learning than sitting and watching 3 hours of different tutorials.

  • Page 1: You are here
  • Page 2: Blender and 3D
  • Page 3: Unity
  • Page 4: More Devblog
  • Page 5: Lectures, essays and other
  • Page 6: VR news, reviews and other content
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Perfect Holiday Destination: #5

I set my image sequence naming conventions up incorrectly and nether DaVinci resolve or ShotCut would recognise the sequence so I manually renamed each file and when that didn’t work I renamed all the files a second time. (I hope to find a automated method of doing this for the future)

I only rendered 25% of the frames because found this video interpolation software called Flow Frame. that fills in the missing frames using AI/ machine learning. However, due to the fast movement of the camera, the interpolation isn’t without the occasional visual bug. especially in the background. This probably wouldn’t pass for an absolute final render but for a project that I’m quickly running out of time on. cutting render times in half for a little visual weirdness when I’m already unable to get the fire particle volume to render its a no-brainer.

Sound found here

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Perfect Holiday Destination: #4

A rant.

Frustration, Anger and Rage.

  • Tabs listed horizontally when there is far more vertical space,
  • nodes open ontop of each other in the shader graph when clicked to inspect.
  • Maya File browser,
  • tool settings resetting and forgetting placement.
  • Jungle of menus.
  • lack of up-to-date and helpfully concise online recourses.
  • created 2 faces in between 4 points while set as a quad
  • Maya fluid sim won’t work with GPU and so I now cant render the light with RT cores.
  • Maya fire rendering in Arnold
  • water shader being projected way off from its mesh

I found working with Maya incredibly frustrating infinitely so when compared to my time learning Unity. This was a large part due to the friction between running into unknown problems and the availability of recourse to get through those issues. If I had run into an issue in Unity I would be able to find a blog or video going over that specific issue and would take me 5 min to go over. sometimes I would have to go over a dozen recourses to find a solution that works for me but it felt like progress into the learning process. With Maya, you would be lucky if the resources weren’t using an out of date UI poor dictation and audio clarity, low resolution and with no crop. These online resources would go over basics for 10 min before getting to specifics then I would watch for another 30 min to find out that I need to keep digging because this did not solve or address my current issue.

I got so frustrated at one point I decided to watch a couple videos going over why Maya is “king” and used over programs like blender “in the industry”. Knowing that I was probably just being a baby and finding it hard starting from step 1 all over again. I listen to an ex Dreamworks employee talk about how great Maya is for lighting and animation but how he had never used it for modelled in Maya and used something called ZBrush instead.

This being said, I find it even more vital for me to power through and learn Maya, knowing that if an employer required me to use Maya at some point, I would struggle and I don’t want that kind of thing to limit me.

I don’t think this project is going to turn out in a way I’m happy with. In the future, I should plan production should start along with planning to help me to figure out my issues early and give myself time to learn from these follies. I didn’t balance out my time well while working parallel with the Introduction to Virtual Reality Unit and should have been putting in more work towards the project in the 2 weeks leading into that Units deadline. considering the headless I faced with a constantly Blue Screening computer leading to lost work and candled renders, living in a very remote part of Scotland over Christmas break and the huge hurdle we are all facing right now that come with the current pandemic.

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Perfect Holiday Destination: #3

After applying myself in small ways to every part of the scene I realised I wouldn’t be motivated until to progress until I had the trees in my scene as they cover the majority of my location and block line of sight that would get me closer to being able to visualise the scenes final composition. I thought I would use the trees found in the “”_”” In theory, It would save me a lot of time however In the pursuit of knowledge I thought I’d make my own and although with a simple form hopefully this will save on render time, with the foresight knowing I will create my renders very close to submission day. ill also be able to block more line of sight with denser trees.

  • Without displacement
  • With displacement

This, however, creates a lot of geometry and as I will be duplicating the tree throughout the island the rendering cost will grow exponentially. At this point I have a few alternative options I could procedurally Decimate and Boolean the leaves generated by Xgen ( this may be too advanced though), I could do that but with baked geometry instead of procedural or I could use a shader with something similar to a bubble noise texture as a normal map or bump map.