Category Archives: Projects

Haunted Hotel Update

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This week our group met on Saturday to go over what we need to do for the next week.

Jerry rebaked the lighting because we wanted to delete certain objects that we want to make interactive (Skeleton on the bike, a few chairs, the chandelier.)

Jerry H. has the programming complete for the game to run.  He was able to get the text up in front of the user so they know how many ghosts they have caught and still need to catch.

The stairs were giving us trouble because in the baked version there was obviously no gravity, so we made a simple sketchup model that will allow for the gravity to work in the space so that the user can get upstairs.

We have been working on inserting sound affects when people walk by certain objects, for example and chair makes a noise when you walk by it, the chandelier glass shatters when you walk by it, etc…

When the user opens the bedroom door with the skeleton on the bike, the bike will come towards the user with a bicycle bell ringing.

Hasti and Natalie spent time looking up some of these sound effects, and Jerry H. also found some.  We have been having trouble finding unique ones for each ghost, but hopefully we find some more effects for the ghosts.

Jerry has also started on the PowerPoint, and I hope to be able to help him with it on Wednesday or Thursday.

This week Jerry H will put the finishing touches on the program with the added sound effects, and then we will be ready to test it out in the CAVE.

Overall, the hotel design is actually pretty creepy and the sound effects add to the eeriness!  I think we are all very pleased!

 

 

5/5 Update

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Dan was out of the country all week with spotty Internet. Nick worked with Kevin and fixed the bounding issues which were preventing us to move smoothly down the mountain surface. At this current point the geometry of the mountain is flat because of the above issues. Tomorrow during the day I plan on changing it so the skier can fly through the air going off jumps. Russ finished modeling the resort, including 1 room for exploration, a lobby, and lounge rooms off lobby.

Things still left to be done:

-skybox

-make runs unique and more interesting

-draw ski model at bottom tangent of bounding sphere

-change between skis, snowboard, sled

-interface Wii Balance Board and potentially controller

 

Monday I (and maybe Dan) are planning to work most of the day, and Russ will work on addressing modeling issues.

 

************EDIT 5/7************

Dan was able to get navigation issues worked out and was able to get the Wii Fit Board connected. Current outstanding programming/interaction tasks are:

  • thresholding the wii fit board for navigation
  • adding an ability for the user to get back to the top of the mountain following a run
  • changing between skiis, snowboard, and sled
  • making the soccerball invisible and showing the skiis
  • adding particle effects? (snow, fire in the lodge)

Ski Mountain Update – 4/28

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This week Russ began modeling the Mountain Resort. We decided that for an appropriate size for the resort (based on the size of our mountain) to make the structure approximately 200′ long x 50′ deep. Based on time limitations, we will keep it very simple to limit the time spent modeling the structure to focus on adding detailing elements to the mountain itself. The general structure of the resort is in place, but I will continue this week to model more rooms and work on applying surface finishes in more of the rooms. Because we want the participants to experience the ski hill more than the mountain resort, more of our focus is on the mountain itself at this time.

Nick worked this week on fine tuning the geometry of the mountain, including creating a flat surface on top where the users will start skiing, and the mountain resort will be placed. He also worked on making the 3 ski runs more individualized so that they vary in difficulty level. We are working on creating the jumps on the various runs, and working on trying to incorporate a half pipe (hopefully we can get it to work with our model!).

Dan worked on the code for our model this week since we were having some trouble getting it to launch on the LEL screen. We were finally able to get the person to move, though are fine tuning the settings and code to make it as realistic as possible.

Dan was able to figure out how to move and rotate the skiis and “attach” the user to the skiis. He is still working on figuring out the following:

-right now you can either rotate or move, you can’t do both (basically, we move by applying a force, and we rotate by applying a Euler translation, and for whatever reason the Euler translation seems to cancel out any applied force)

-when you attach the user to the skiis, they disappear

-there is still some bizarre bounding box stuff going on. I’m not sure if it is due to the way the mountain is represented (probably) or the skiis (also possible), but a lot of times the skiis will bounce of invisible things due to (I’m assuming) bounding box errors
(we are trying to address this as we fine tune the mountain model)

 

 

C.A.V.E. 4/28 Update

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THIS WEEK IN C.A.V.E. NEWS:

Group: Tried to test the Egypt level in the cave, but it was taking forever to load.

Lauren: Finished the Terminal and Egypt models.

Kevin: Got the Kinect VR to work and is now looking into getting the Egypt file up and running tonight.

CC: Almost finished with the Museum level. Needs to be tested

Nick: Worked out all puzzles/level flow diagrams. Started shooping for the Egyptian(hieroglyphics) & Museum(paintings) levels. Started creating the handouts to users.

What we’ll need for next week: Temple and Museum modeled. Add puzzle elements and programming to Temple, Museum, Egypt levels. Everything tested. Finish the user handouts. Start the powerpoint for the final presentation.

The Jasper: Week 4 Update

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Hi!

This week we started to bake lighting and did more FBX about ghosts when they were caught! We had some questions how to export animations of explosions into FBX. But we also have B plan if it does not work. We added lighting effects in 3D Studio Max in order to create scaring and creepy atmosphere in our hotel.

Bake Lighting of 2F

Bake lighting of 1F

Bake Lighting of Landscape

FBX animation

 Link: 001~4 001~5

 Link: 002~4

 Link: 003~4 003~5

  Link: 005~3

Update from Hasti:

I finished the landscape and outside of the Hotel.

After merging the whole models (restaurant, lobby, rooms and landscape), the final file became too big because of using so many textures and material after adding the details. This data was stored in the SketchUp file and caused the slow work loading. So, we purged our file as following steps to delete all unnecessary textures to make it run faster:

  1. Click “Window” > “Model Info.” The Model Info dialog box will open.
  2. Click “Statistics” > “Purge Unused.”
    (https://sites.google.com/site/sketchupsage/faster/purge)

Updates from Jerry H:

We have a solid framework as far as game engine and base classes to create various ghosts and monsters. The Paranormal class, which serves as the base class for all other specialty creepy things, is now ready to interact, showing the paranormal in three states: “hidden” (as a static object), “discovered” (static, or animation through either programming or FBX), and “captured” (simply disappear, or animation through programming/FBX). It’s very easy to extend the class and inject different programmatic animations; I’ve created a “ghost” class that hovers during the discovered state.

The model as a whole is really really big—upward of 189Mb—and has been causing Sketchup to crash. Natalie has helped me create a simplified version of the hotel, in which rooms are represented by simple blocks, so that we can export it to get the coordinates. Once all the OSG files with lighting baked in are ready, I’ll try to put the hotel back together.

By Saturday I was trying to display text in the CAVE but I’ve no luck. I can attach a mesh (e.g. a sphere) to a fixed position in front of the user0 entity, so that the user will always see it, but I just can’t get the text to show. Help??

Simple FBX files work fairly well in the CAVE. Jerry C and I (haha, Jerry x 2) discovered that FBX coming out of 3DS sometimes may get turned in a funny angle; this is due to a “Y-up” or “Z-up” option when exporting. I’ve extended Kevin’s Animation class to allow easy pre-scaling and pre-rotation when loading an animation file; feel free to grab it if you need.

As for the game interaction, originally I really hope to work with Wii mote and Kinect, but practically we might just not be able to get there because of time. However, if any of the other teams have had success in connecting with the Wii fit board, please let me know—the library to call Wii board and Wii mote are the same, and maybe I can bounce off your code.

Update 4/21

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This Friday we were able to try some of our models in the CAVE. The terminal had some issues and the walls didn’t show up. Lauren is going to try building the walls differently to see if it solves the problem. The terminal currently looks like this:

Kevin and Nick tried to put physics on certain objects, but the floor was also not working correctly and the objects were falling through. Hopefully when the terminal is rebuilt the floor will stay in place.

CC is continuing to build her model and has found paintings that we are going to include in one of our games.

Kevin looked at programming voice commands with the Kinect. This is something we will incorporate into our games. It looks like this is going to work well.

Nick continued working on planning the games and as soon as the models are functioning, he will be ready to get those working.

Ski Mountain Update 2

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This week we continued to work on our design. We have decided to refine the design of the mountain to have a cabin embedded into the side of the mountain instead of at the peak. This will half the amount of objects and trails we need to create as now only one side of the mountain will be traversable. The inspiration for this is Mesa Verde:

We were able to get a semi-successful skiing interaction using just the physics engine. We still need to update this as the camera currently faces backwards. We are also exploring using additional methods for friction-less surfaces (e.g., ski-like bounding box instead of sphere). Hopefully this will allow us to have more realistic skiing interactions.

 

Over the course of the next week, we will integrate the Wii fit board into the interaction and will work on the bounding boxes. We will also work to make the runs more interesting by adding additional geometry so that the runs are not a constant angle. We will also begin work on the mountain resort. Our goal is to get the project into the CAVE by the end of the week.

********************

Below are some images of the modeling work we have completed on the updated Mountain. This week I hope to customize the runs more, as well as work on modeling a mountain resort specific to our project. As Dan stated above, you can see that we cut the size of the mountain in half to limit extra items that needed modeling. In addition, I have changed out the trees to one that is much simpler and have grouped them, so hopefully this will make exporting the file much easier.

The Jasper: Week 3 Update

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4/20/2013

Hi! I finished the materials of restaurant. I also did some animations of ghosts. We also have put all our models in one file. We are going to finish some details in the future.

Scaring Restaurant:

Ghosts animations:

I will export them as FBX and test them in CAVE next week. I hope them works and we can put them everywhere in our project.

The link:

001~1      002~1     003~1     004~1     005~1

The ghost preview:

 

Update from Natalie:

This past week I worked on messing up my model to make it less perfect and more cluttered and messy.  Jerry C just showed me how to create a wall paper texture in photoshop to add some dirt and blood to the walls, so that will be the last thing to add for upstairs to make it more spooky.  I have also modeled a door, shower curtain, and dresser so that Jerry H can begin to play with that animated programing.

Here are some pictures of the upstairs…

Updates from Jerry H:

  • With help from Kevin the instructor I’m getting the foundation of the code settled. Much of our interactive objects will be inherited from the UW in-house lel_common code.
  • I’ve created a door object that will open and close upon interaction. A finding that is relevant for modeling interactive objects:
    • Parts that are moving must be its own component. For example, the actual door must be separated from the door frame and the hinge.
    • Where the moving part is within the component itself is very important. Specifically, if the object is rotating, the rotating axis/point must be (0,0,0) within the component. For example, the point where a door rotates on should be (0,0,0) within the component.
  • We have also checked that FBX animation files should work very well in the CAVE.

 

Updates from Hasti:

  • I’ve finished the modelling and details of the lobby.

  • I am working on modeling the outside of the Jasper and landscape design. I’ve built a  cemetery in the back side of the building (image below):

  • I am also working on the exterior design of the Hotel and I hope to finish it by Thursday.
  • I found the 3D animated model of a spider that I think it would be interesting to add it in our haunted hotel.
    (http://www.turbosquid.com/)

– Here are the 3D models of the spider:

– I’ve also rendered this animation (the link below):

                  spider

 

 

 

 

 

 

Update #1

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This week we began modeling the geometry of the mountain and run #1. We also found a Ski Lift model that we will further customize to use in our project, and found a cabin to use as a place holder until we have time to model our own. Moving forward, I plan to continue modeling run #2, and start modeling the cabin at the top of the mountain. In addition, we are trying to explore ways to make the snow on the ground look fluffy and realistic, as opposed to a flat, painted on surface.

During class on thursday, we created a very basic shape to explore movement up and down an inclined ramp on the LEL screen to test basic movement properties as they will be applied to our mountain scenario. We hope to continue to explore this, and continue working on copying portions of the programing code that we also started working on.

Update #1

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So far this week we decided on a lot of core concepts to be included in the project. Below is a list of the features each person included.

Lauren: I’m working on the pyramid and terminal model. I should have the structures done by Tuesday, although I probably won’t have materials on.

CC: I have done modeling the building which is having the museum. I will continue to add materials and work with the interior of the museum this week. In addition, i will finish an outdoor environment before this Tuesday.

Kevin: I’m working on getting familiar with the Kinect SDK for voice today.

Nick: I have created nice outlines for puzzles in the Egypt and Temple levels. They’ll probably have to be refined a bit with the models of the structures, but we’ll handle that when it gets there. I’ll do the museum as soon as I have a nice list of paintings to go on.