Week 8 Notes
Developement Critique I / Progress Report (1 Mar)
We are at one third of our whole period of project development schedule. As we started with brainstorming and planning, the first progress is relatively less that following two. However, since it has been full three weeks after our proposal submission, it is good to review our progress and catch-up remaining schedule accordingly.
Each student has 10-15 min presentation and 5-10 min discussion with classmates.
Interesting recent work in Kinect hack
Do you remember Johnny Lee's Wiimote hack? Especially the version of head tracking to create proper 3D perspective.
See TED video here. By the way, TED is great source of meeting/sharing world renowned figures' idea.
With Kinect, we can do similar work in better quality without wearing wiimote ir led. Even better, combining 3D TV, we can almost get home version of virtual reality system. check out following video.
Kinect + 3D TV => Virtual Reality by Robert Kooima (youtube video here)
Virtools Review
Special Features or Special Effects (SFX)
Virtools provides some interesting visual effect related building blocks. You can find those BBs under Visuals/FX category. Followings are some of them. (composition files are in Virtools documentation directory).
* Note that it is important to know what's available. However, the availability does not justify its usage. Use any only if you need it in your application for good reason. Not just because it is there.
Simple Lighting Effect (Bloom/Glow like) using Light Sprite BB
See this example.
You can find this example from virtools BB docuemntation cmo directory and light sub folder.
Test with different type of texture image to see various feel of it.
How about make your point light to animate with its range? This affect the size of your light sprite.
This is a very simple trick to mimic the feel of real light a bit.
Render Scene in RT view
We practiced Render Scene in RT View before. Look at this example here. (you can find it in class pickup directory)
Two key task we need to do for this effect are...
- Add another camera (aka virtual camera) to produce the render image you like to use as texture.
(you can use main camera for this if you just want to grab the same one as our main camera rendering result. this is typically useful if you like to use it on 2D Interface).
- Add your own texture to be used as target texture with rendered image on it.
* for the similar effect, you may use Planar Reflection BB instead of Render Scene in RT. Then, we need to add reflective object attribute on Eva character and checker floor object so that those object is rendered on mirror wall. This is in fact more precise reflection model since it takes our main camera's perspective into acount to genereate mirrored image on wall.