Motion Capture

This week we finally had our first MoCap session for our Capstone The Draft.  This was really cool and we had some great talent to work with.  I was in charge of the session and took the actors through the motions that we wanted.  We were in the studio for 4 hours and took over 100 shots of about 45 animations.  We made sure we were very thorough and recorded 3 takes of each animation.  This will make the battle animations look really realistic.  Our artists worked hard and we already have 3 of the animations in engine to display with this coming Capstone Presentation tomorrow.  Here are the animations!

That's all for now.  More great things to come!

Template classes

Today, I finished my first template class in C++.  Our requirement for an assignment was to write a list class to be used in future projects.  This was a big challenge and something new to me.  In the end, what helped out the most, was first creating the class for a primitive type int and then creating a template that accepted any type.  This project was also my first time using unit tests in C++.  I had only ever performed JUnit tests in Java so I was unaware of where to begin.  It turned out to surprisingly be easier than I thought.  However, one must write a ton of code to make sure all of the bases are covered when unit testing.  It was cool to get back into testing since it has been a while.  More great things to come!

Otronicon

This past weekend, I spent several hours at a booth promoting FIEA at Otronicon.  This was a very cool science convention that displayed the latest technologies such as virtual reality.  My game VRChaeology was selected to be displayed at the convention.  I was there to run the VR station which ran for the rest of the weekend.  My team spent time over break to prepare our game for the convention at the request from the faculty.  The game was a great hit!  We had people lined up for hours to play.  What was especially rewarding was seeing tiny children have their first VR experience and having a fun time.  Many were 6 or younger.  That was simply incredible.  Seeing your hard work pay off by having people enjoy your game is simply indescribable.  This was a great playtest session with the public and I recorded a great amount of data on how the game could be made easier and more intuitive.  My team plans to further improve VRChaeology for future conventions and perhaps an Steam release.  More to come!

Wwise education

Wow, been a while since I posted here.  I Came back to school a couple weeks ago and things have been ramping up for capstone and other projects.  My break was very successful.  I got to investigate the amazing program known as Wwise.  It's industry standard for creating dynamic sounds for games.  Even the amazingly popular game Overwatch uses it.  I spent the break learning how to perform many cool sound actions in my future games.  This will be extremely useful in my capstone game and the team was very grateful for it.  Yesterday I even held a training session for students at FIEA on how to create a few events in Wwise and then use them in the Unreal Engine.  The class went over very well and many teams are using Wwise inside of their own capstone projects.  Lots of cool stuff to come!