Final year project

I thought it could be quite interesting to talk about my third year final project. For those of you who don’t know much about final year projects at university, I will try to explain a brief overview of what it is. 

This is consists of 4 units, 2 of those units are dedicated to the final year project, so it’s quite import that I chose something I enjoy doing, something I don’t know much about and finally something which would be a good topic for discussion. I personally chose something that I didn’t really know too much about because I knew I would be spending such a huge amount of time on the project. Already at this stage of the project, I know how to do everything and the research has been done for me to confidently complete the task.

It’s very strange in the field of computer animation. To the average person if they watch some of the animations it’s difficult to understand how something is done. What I mean by this is I could create a wall the breaks while being hit in about 2 minutes inside 3ds max. It can look amazingly realistic and it takes no effort. To the average user, it looks really complex. Yet if someone made a dynamic rig of a character which would take so much more effort it wouldn’t portray to the audience. This means for your final thesis you could technically choose something which might be visually amazing. But you would be much better of creating something more technical and original that using pre-set techniques and scripts.  

The topic I have chosen is geometry and material morphing. I’m creating a dynamic rig in which I can showcase coherently geometry and material morphing. The main character will be an ostrich, reason being is it’s an animal that beforehand I had no trivia or knowledge about the animal, this allowed me to have a fresh start and research into an animal which has a very different locomotion and structure to what I’m usually used to. Furthermore I can showcase the morphing rig using the face of the ostrich. Without going into too much detail, the rig will show when a character morphs into key poses, wrinkles will appear on the face of the ostrich.

Latest version of my ostrich model (featherless)

So my project is very technical, yet I’m still hoping to create something that should be visually entertaining too. For people who want to know more about my project, I’m currently writing up my 70+ page thesis on it. Plus I will be making a public post on my own blog when it’s finally complete.

University of Bedfordshire GameJam 2014!

Last weekend (#dates) I attended a gamejam at the university. For those of you who don’t know what a gamejam is, it’s basically where a bunch of nerds get together and create games/apps. If that wasn't geeky enough, it’s a 48 hour constant hackathon. I've attended similar events at the university, but this one had a rather strange theme which was…

"We don’t see things as they are, we see them as we are”

This is a broad subject for a theme so it took quite a bit of planning to get the right theme and style game. My group members were:

Artists – Sean McGee, Robert McGreal and Chris Hadjimbeis

Programmers/Unity Developers – Kyle Field, Grant Wade, Tareq Ahmed and Daniel Nelson

Planning the game

We decided to create a horror game. In the 48 hours given we achieved a rather unique and scary game. We also had access to an Oculus Rift.

                                

Oculus Rift Device

This is really fun device which allows users to look around a scene using their heads. So they just move to look; we thought this would be perfect with a horror game. We decided to create a game similar to that of “Alone” which is an existing Oculus Rift game, but we tried to implement quite a few new features. I’ll update this blog when I get my hands on the project files to show you how it looked. The project we called "Synced" might be available soon on a few devices to play for yourself, so I'll let you know when I get more news.

Events like this will always be good to go to. Not only is it a personality test as you need to work in groups in harsh situations with a very fast deadline, but you get to test your own body without sleep.  Most people can’t handle it and end up sleeping under desks for a few hours. This time I actually stayed with local friends for the weekend but I still managed to get a lot done. I personally think no matter how good you are at time management, there are always things that creep up on you at the last minute. A gamejam is a nice way to test how you do under pressure and how much work is physically possible in the time given.