Category: Virtual Macquarie Island

Virtual Macquarie Island

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VMI 2.0

Virtual Macquarie Island v2.0 . Version 2.0 presents a massive leap-forward upon v1.0 on display at the Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery (TMAG) since 2021. The project received Visions of Australia funding to develop the project from a simple demonstrator to a sophisticated prototype suitable for permanent and travelling exhibition....

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VMI Blog IX: Weather & Penguins!

A quick demo on work-in-progress on VMI, demonstrating progress on weather simulations and few other features. I’m using the fantastic UDS rather than the inbuilt UE volumetrics and particle systems, as this provides an off-the-shelf weather solution with a ton of customizable features via blueprints. This is working in conjunction...

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VMI Blog VIII: Voices in the Digital Twin

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.

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VMI Blog VII: Animals and Environment

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...

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VMI Blog VI: Metahumans Lighting Preview

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,...

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VMI Blog V: A Metahuman Experiment

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...

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VMI Blog IV

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...

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VMI Blog III

A bit of progress on VMI visualization using the latest version of Cesium for Unreal. Mainly working on lookdev and accurate geolocation of assets. These are unmodified renders straight from Unreal, running in real time – so quite impressive. Still – there are glitches and issues to be sorted out,...

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VMI Blog II

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...