Adding Effects to the Demo
This week my coworker Marvis left to go to the XSEDE conference, so I stayed at the vislab working on the demo. We had already test the demo with the Leap Motion Controller and the Oculus last week, and we were able to get the demo running in Game Mode with some of the specials effects such Motion Blur and Tint Blur. However, we hadn't been able to make the first player character move with the special effects or the the Leap Motion Camera. So I spend Monday and most of Tuesday trying to make sure the leap motion camera worked with the First Person Controller Script so the user can actually move in the environment.
After that, I spend the rest of the week working on the specials effects for the environment, which included objects fade in/ out from the scene, flickering bright lights, and a blurry view from the camera. In order to make the field of view from the first person camera blurry, I had to attached various scripts to the leap motion camera.
Meanwhile, I made some of the objects inside the house fade in/out at random moments once the character goes in. It seem to be random objects, but I actually added the script only to the objects that look well with having their material set to fade or transparent, because that's is the only property the script works with. Adding the script that manipulates the intensity of the objects was quite easy and the script itself isn't that long or complicated, so it didn't took that much time.
What was more time consuming was setting up a trigger so the effects would only start once the character enter the house. Since they are 20 objects overall that have scripts in them, I had to set up 20 public objects and drag them each object to its respective variable.
I'm actually kinda proud of my work this week, especially since I get to do some scripts myself. They're probably not the most efficient methods ever but it works so far without anything crashing down. I learned how to set up a certain object as a trigger and how to enabled a script of another object through that trigger object.
I would say the demo we currently had is about 80% to what we actually wanted. But at least we were able to build a showable demo from the ground up. We worked as best as we could with time and resources that we were given, including getting familiarized with Unity3D and C#. We hope we can show this demo to the other SRS researches at the SRS Poster Session on Wednesday 26, 2016.
For another part, me and James went to the Media Mayhem! workshop with Sean. I actually liked his talk a lot because he talk about how he was integrating media in the science fields. Not many people realize, especially researchers, but it's important for scientist to get coverage in the media so other people can more easily found out what is they're doing. I told him I was interested in doing a masters in Computer Animation or Cinematography and he gave me advice on how I can bring a unique expertise of computer science into the field. For me, the talk was very inspirational.
