Week 17

Research

I began this week by reading a chapter on 3D graphics. It helped me to understand how essential materials are to objects. Materials fully control the appearance of objects in the scene using shaders and properties. Whilst using Unity I had come across shaders and properties but didn’t understand their definitions. This chapter allowed me to fully understand what each of them do. I also learnt that I could set objects to be solid colours that aren’t affected by the lighting in my scene. This showed me that there are lots of ways I can use shaders for different lighting effects in my scene, creating many different aesthetics.

Workshops

This week I continued with my VR project. I moved onto the section about user interface on Tuesday and began looking into how I can make my project easier for users to understand. I enjoyed implementing this section as it helped me understand what my controls did as I explained them on my menu. After completing this section I then moved onto the optimisation section of the tutorial. This meant that I added in options that a user can change for accessibility. I found this particularly interesting as such a small change can make your whole project accessible for others. Its important to me that I am making a project that can be used by nearly everyone and this allowed me to do so in a simple way. 

In the technical workshop this week we looked more into sculpting in Blender. For this workshop I made a simple face to practise how different tools work. I used the clay strips tool to make eyebrows, a nose, and lips. I used the inverse of this tool to add eye sockets that I then added spheres into. Working on a face also allowed me to use the symmetry tool and discover how the different axis create symmetry. This really helped me understand how I can sculpt in Blender to create add ins for my projects. We were also able to see some more advanced work to fully see how sculpting assets can improve our work.

Lecture

This week we had a visiting lecturer who owned his own company to do with XR and its uses in the world. He began with headsets that could be used in city planning and building to show how a plan would look in the space. He brought along the headset that he used for this nearly five years ago and it was incredibly fascinating to see how light that headset was compared to the modern versions that are being produced at the moment. He then showed us some of his more recent projects and they were a mix of corporate projects, and more art based. All the projects he produces are used to show meaningful information to people in more interesting ways. He showed us a piece of work he had made for BT that used data for a smart city using augmented reality. I had seen this piece in person in 2023 in BT’s adastral park where it is currently displayed. I found it interesting that a piece of work that I had seen like that being displayed in their R and D lab was made by someone that doesn’t work within BT. It showed me that my work is capable of being shown anywhere as long as it’s good enough.