Lara's Research Updates

The day has finally come! Around noon, I started setting up for the final show in the studio as the rest of the team arrived. I had hoped to have everything ready by 3:30 pm so we had an hour buffer to fix anything that went wrong (especially after yesterday's license issue, phew!). Setting up the computers.  I started by bringing the computer carts into the studio and connecting them to power and ethernet. When the main computer was ready, some of my teammates were able to make any last-minute adjustments to the project while I set up everything else. Power cables for tech.  While organizing chairs as needed for the audience I also pulled down some power cords from the ceiling in the studio where I knew we needed power for Kinects and other equipment. Room organization.  With the help of other teammates, we pulled the storage boxes for lights and other equipment out of the studio and placed them neatly in the hallway. I pulled out the projection screen and positioned the...

The day before the final exhibit! We still had a few more things to adjust in the project, but otherwise, I had thought we were in a good spot already. As usual, I had multiple tasks to help in different areas of the project. I started by fully integrating all of the particle effects along with Vivian. In addition to the sockets I'd used on our puppet skeleton last time for testing, I created more sockets for every touch area. We had 12 of them in total: 2 on each arm, 2 on each leg, 2 on the front/chest, and 2 on the back. (Some of the sockets on the puppet skeleton to which the emitters will be attached.) For some sockets that were created inside a larger part of the mesh, like chest/back, I moved them slightly outside the body so that the particles wouldn't disappear inside the mesh. After deciding, which sockets were going to be attached to which touch areas and trigger what kind of particle fx, I made all the necessary connections inside the blueprint. (All touch-socket-pa...

As the final exhibition neared closer, I focused on enhancing a few different aspects of our project based on our latest dress rehearsal: restart button for the performance, adding fx based on immediate feedback from touch sensors, and fully integrating post-process settings based on discomfort level. I started by adding a restart blueprint to our project. This process was fairly easy and much simpler than I had imagined. With the following blueprint, I was able to use the "R" key on the keyboard to restart the scene instead of shutting down nDisplay and launching it all over again. Next, I worked on integrating post-process settings into our main camera. As I had figured out how to connect the camera I wanted to nDisplay and bring it into our master blueprint already, all that was left now was to pick the post-process effects we liked and adjust the settings as we needed. We decided to work with the saturation, contrast, and film grain. As the discomfort level of the perform...

Today we did a full dress rehearsal to get a sense of how the exhibit would work and collect feedback from the attending audience. Before the rehearsal started, I worked on a few things in the Unreal project to better the experience. Since I had arrived at the studio early, I wanted to give nDisplay one more chance by using a different machine. I rolled out another computer on a cart next to the one we've been using and tried connecting it to the multi-user session. However, I quickly came across hardware issues with the new computer. It had a pretty old GTX graphics card, and it wasn't strong enough to handle multi-user and rendering at the same time. Just logging into the computer even took 15 minutes! I had to abandon my two-screen display ideas once again... Next, I made some changes to our Switchboard settings to be able to edit the project more intuitively. Last time I was trying to position the curtains properly, I had to make changes, launch nDisplay, check the position...

During class this week, my team decided to shelve the two-display idea for the exhibit. We decided that while it would be a good feature to have, it's not a part of the core of the performance and we'd like to focus on other parts of the exhibit as the finals week nears. However, I wanted to try one more idea with nDisplay before giving up because it was going to bother me so much if I didn't see it working. Also, I personally wanted to gain a bit more experience with nDisplay configurations. My idea was to use two different machines to control two different displays. This is normally how LED screens are set up anyway, and this way, each machine can focus on rendering only one or two screens. Different machines will still use the same project and setup. They will be communicating with each other over the network with what Unreal calls "Multi-User Sessions". I used the handy Unreal documentation  to set up the session. Multi-User Session Activate the "Multi-Us...

Today I started my work in the studio by continuing some tests on nDisplay configurations. As a proof of concept, I decided to use my laptop and a TV monitor to test the multiple screens setup. I connected my laptop to the TV with a display cable and made sure the screens were lined up and numbered correctly in settings. (Display settings showing my laptop (HD) as number 1 and the TV (4K) as number 2) After setting up the hardware, I went to the nDisplay configuration in Unreal to position the viewports. With this configuration, I should have the first nDisplay screen appear on the top-left corner of my laptop and the second screen across the whole TV. To my surprise, the setup worked perfectly on the first try! This test shows that my setup yesterday was also correct and the issues I had stemmed from the nature of having 2 projectors in our setup. Since we can't get rid of the projectors or turn one of them off (it will lower the brightness and contrast), I will need to do some te...

Along with the nDisplay work this week, I've spent some time looking into triggers and collision boxes that could be attached to moveable actors. A few weeks ago, I had successfully made the puppet in the scene walk into a collision box on the ground to trigger a light to turn on. This time, I wanted to test if I could have the collision box moving throughout the scene. My first test was to create a simple light trigger based on collision in a blueprint and attach it to a moving actor. For this, I chose a sphere that had physics applied, which would fall to the ground at the beginning of play. I created the collision blueprint separately without any objects inside, so the blueprint could be duplicated and used with different actors in the scene. In order to get the collision box to follow the sphere as it fell, I parented the blueprint in the scene to the sphere actor. The parenting worked as I hoped and next, I made sure that the collision for the light trigger was working. I play...

As we met today in the studio, I've worked on a few different things ranging from the final stage of the puppet to more testing with nDisplay. First things first, I wanted to make sure to fix the issue with the puppet not moving when nDisplay is launched. As I had guessed, this issue from last week had to do with Live Link connections not updating when nDisplay is on screen. This turned out to be a relatively easy fix! All I had to do was to create a preset for Live Link after making sure the data was coming from iPi and then set nDisplay to use that preset when it launched. (Setting up Live Link preset to launch with nDisplay) Secondly, I worked a little on the creation of the puppet's stage in Unreal. While other teammates were working on gathering and importing assets that would be used for the final look, I put together a quick scene that could be the base. (The rectangles in front of the scene are the nDisplay screens that show the final look on projection.) (Basic stage s...