Koikyennuruff (Stirling Ranges)
These mountains have always been a special place for me – one of my existential places in the world. They’re not especially high, nor extensive, but they are ancient and, as far as I...
Category: Blog
my blog
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...
GPlates Visualizations
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...
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...
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...
How to generate SRT subtitles from audio recordings using Word
A quick note about a free-ish (or relatively low cost) and not-too-finicky but a-bit-technical way to generate subtitles for video interviews using Microsoft Word – up to 1hr in length (00:59:59,999) – or longer...
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...
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...
360 Blog – Experiments
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,...
No New Messages
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...
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...
Experiments with Unreal Engine 5
As I progress with testing the new capabilities – and limitations – of UE5, I’ll post them here. The main objective is to work out an effective workflow using new features such as Lumen...
Virtual South Georgia
What started off as a little zero-budget technical experiment in my spare time inadvertently turned into a bit of an epic. Anyway, I started getting my head around some technical things I wanted to...
Of Ancient Design – UE Short Film Challenge: Production Background
It’s been such a mad rush it’s a bit difficult to recall the exact order of events. Back in July 2020 I entered the Unreal Engine Short Film Challenge Australia. That got me into...
Receiving DVB-T broadcasts and SDR on MacOS
Update July 2020: Check out the comments for newer solutions using Xubuntu and Kaffeine app. The advice provided here is getting a bit old, but may still work with Ubuntu 14.04. For an updated...
Real-Time Cosmological Simulation Visualization for VR
I’m very taken by the possibilities of Voluminous – a real-time volumetric visualization system developed by Drew Whitehouse of the ANU NCI Vizlab in 2011 – I’ve used it myself for a few demos...
Dawn Walk, Hinsby Beach
It was a kind of sulphurous dawn, with bush fires on the peninsular. Remarkable.
Astrocinematography Road Trip (2012)
I’ve been commissioned by the Gascoyne Aboriginal Heritage and Cultural Centre of Carnarvon, Western Australia, to produce a fulldome program that illustrates elements of Indigenous Australian astronomy. This will feature visualizations displayed upon a...
