Alvina Atmadja Spring 2013

Hi there, Alvina’s here!

This semester is my first time joining the Emergent Game Group as one of its 2D artist/3D modeller. I dare to say that it’s the best decision I made for this semester. I re-discover my interest in 2D painting. I learned a lot of tips and tricks to make a good 3D model. I meet a lot of new friends. And did I mention that there’s a lot of cool stuff happening at the lab?:)

I spent the first half of the semester modelling some stuff for Ellis Island game. During the latter half, I did some UV mapping and texturing for 2 of the Mermaid models: the Merbaby and the Eel. While working on those models, I learned the hard way on how UV mapping could be something really challenging. I manage to get by with capturing UV map based on camera with my Ellis model. However, I need to get myself used to the other modes of capturing UV maps when I worked on the models for Mermaid, especially with the Eel model. I spent at least 2 hours playing around with the UV capture tools for each of the models, something that I hope I could improve in the future. Aside from that, I also getting a dip into model rigging and some magical tricks to overcome texture stitches, something ugly that must be avoided at all cost. On the texturing side, I spent most of my time experimenting with color blend and shading, especially when working on the Merbaby.

Merbaby front texture

Merbaby back texture -- the power of shading

Eel texture -- because we need more pink in Mermaid

Although I believe my works can’t be compared to the pros out there yet,  I can’t stressed enough how I learned a lot from spending my time working on the assets for EGG’s projects this semester. The semester is ending, but I’ll be sticking around with EGG on fall as well. I’ll be looking forward to see everybody and to learn something new next semester!

Carson Britt Spring 2012 – Spellcasting Capstone

This semester I worked with a team of four on designing and implementing a spell casting  system as part of my Computational Media capstone project. This spell casting system is based on gestures that the player drasw with the mouse. Each gesture corresponds to a spell that will be cast upon the successful completion of the gesture. My role on this project involved the initial design of the system and then the programming of the core gesture recognition logic and the drawing mechanic. The following is a brief explanation of how I implemented some of these features.

Drawing:

When the player holds down the mouse button they will see a stroke appear in the world that follows the mouse [fig 2]. The 2d coordinates of the mouse are converted to 3d world coordinates with a set distance away from the player, this makes a more tangible drawing interface and also allows other mermaids to see what other mermaids are drawing. These drawings will fade after a few seconds.

fig 2.

 Gesture Recognition:

Essentially the spell casting works by comparing the gesture that  the player draws to a set of predefined templates. When the player holds down the mouse the system will store a list of x,y points for the cursor, this list will then be compared to each template list [fig 2] and assigned a score as to how close the gesture matches each template, the template with the lowest match will correspond to the gesture, if no score is within a given range there will be no match.

fig 2.

The system also accounts for users drawing a rotated or small gestures by optimizing the gesture (i.e. rotating, moving, scaling the list of points to match the templates).