visualisation, inventiones
GPlates is ‘a plate tectonics program..(used to)..manipulate reconstructions of geological and paleogeographic features through geological time.’ I’ve looked at (and used) GPlates on and off over the years – it’s definitely the kind of software you need to spend some time getting your head around, as it is deep and...
A night-time flight around Macquarie Island, reflecting both technical progress, technical issues, and a composite narrative of scientists who have worked there – an initial experiment in Digital Twin story-telling.Plus: demonstration of 3rd-person VR actor and satellite-derived inflow of vegetation mapping.
We’re making good progress on environmental visualization and placing animals in our VMI simulation. Gina Moore and I have been working closely together and have moved a huge amount of our workflow into Houdini and Houdini Engine, as this offers so many advantages over using inbuilt UE tools – especially...
One of the challenges of creating ‘beliveable’ Metahumans for VMI has been striking a fine balance between creating CG surrogates for our scientists – that they are more-or-less happy with – and avoiding stereotypes and cliches. It is not immediately apparent that the Metahuman interface sets out to avoid this,...
Part of the brief we developed for our Virtual Macquarie Island project involves the deployment of in-world avatars of the scientists we interviewed. We’ve been very fortunate to interview nine specialists with many decades of on-island experience between them, covering a wide range of disciplines. What is striking about the...
A brief 9-minute overview of work-in-progress on Virtual Macquarie Island for the VMI Project. The movie covers the development of the environment and terrain model, ocean workflow and initial development tests in endemic fauna visualization – the Southern Elephant Seal and Wandering Albatross. Lots more in the pipeline! November 2021...
Some experiments in mono & stereoscopic 360 renders for VR. The youtube video is a test of panoramic rendering from Unreal Engine 4.26 using Cesium for Unreal. There are technical problems with panoramic rendering, LOD and tile loading that I am investigating – but its a good start.
An old iPhone recording (2016) of a scam telephone call, using a synthesized voice, recorded on an old answering machine (2000) that uses an even older synthetic voice, meets NVIDIA’s Audio2Face (2021) – ‘an AI-powered application that generates expressive facial animation from just an audio source.’ A conjunction both sinister...
As mentioned in the previous blog post, I’m exploring the excellent WaterLine water system, which is enabling me to ~finally~ get some decent results with shorelines – something that is clearly a subject of active development in computer graphics, as the physics are so complicated and hard to simulate from...
