visualisation, inventiones
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 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 if you cut up your video into <1hr transcripts. How long this will work, I have...
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...
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,...
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...
