Week 11 – April 24th! Yayy we’re finally there! :D

This week, we had everything to be final so that we could present on the final day, and indeed we did! The final presentation was very fulfilling today (30th Apr) and it was very happening to see everyone else’s projects and developments so far. For this to happen we constantly kept changing, enhancing and polishing the project so that we could present the best version of ourselves and wanted the final presentation to be a success.

Once the polishing was done, We made a project trailer, the entire Indomitable video experience, all shot in Virtual Reality (HTC Vive), we had to update the alot of the detailed design document which describes and talks about every aspect of our project. We also had to make a presentation for the final day.

This week we also spoke with our TA, to understand her feedback after all the final modifications were on point. She was happy with the outcome and it has been very satisfying for us a a team to be able to successfully complete an end to end project. The main learning outcome this week was accountability. I think we all stepped up and contributed our fair share to come up to the finish line. Overall it was a successful semester and had an immense learning curve which we all hoped for. Very much grateful to Professor Vangelis, Professor Michael, and also all the TA’s for mentoring and guiding us throughout.

Week 10 – April 17th.. .. ..!

This was the week for us to make those constant updates, pushes and work as smart, hard, and fast as possible so that we could include all the components before the final day. The main success of this week was that we were communicating as a team like never before. We were given a lot of changes and feedback from our professor with regards to some of the things like – appearance of fire and felt different in different areas, the background voice could use Amazon Polly for life-like voice and also to update a few look and feel aspects and also some comments on the optimization.

We took all the feedback from Professor Vangelis and TA Shwetha and modified all of it by the end of the week and again had a review session with them. We were at a much better position than before and were much appreciated by our professor and TA. This week we learnt to accommodate last minute changes and be adaptive to requirements and keep that creative mind of yours always switched on. Overall it was a very fun and productive week.

Week 9! – April 9th

This week we felt there was something lagging in the progress. Everything was in place yet something did not feel right, we quickly decided to take in charge of broader spectrum of responsibility individually like Optimization, Look and Feel – Finishing touches, etc and deep dived into our respective domains. We realized that our project was completely experience based and hence the Fire spreading around is a very crucial part of it, but at the same time this is extensively dragging down the FPS (Frames per second), when view in Virtual Reality. But because of this we could not compromise on the amount of fire.

Hence we looked into optimization techniques to increase the FPS. These included, learning and understanding Profiler and what the spikes mean, used Static and Dynnamic Batching to batch various objects, used Single Pass rendering and looked at GPU Instantiation.

This increased the FPS by a considerable amount inspite of having a heavy fire all around. The experience in VR started to look threatning and give a real sense of presense, which was the initial aim. This week, we all learnt how to work best as a team and learnt to prioritize tasks, optimization and efficiency was at the top this week and we were successfully able to come around with it this week.

Also due to the pandemic around the situation allowed us to collaborate only remotely and though this was difficult for the project initially, we very soon became very comfortable using Unity Collab to push major changes and collaborate with the rest of the team.Had to resort to this as Git, Git Labs and Profuse were inefficient due to the massive size of the build!

Week 8 – April 2nd

This week, we were implementing a new task which the user would do in the campsite. Experimenting around ‘walking’ the campsite and not necessarily teleportation, we are working on reducing and cutting down the unwanted parts of the terrain and keeping only the campsite. We are enhancing the lighting effects and the look inside the tent as well, as we have decided the tent in the campsite is from where the scene starts and we do not need to necessarily have two separate scenes as before which were one before the fire and one after the fire.

The assets of Gaia were giving better effects, hence trying to implement bits and pieces from this asset and add it to our campsite. Now, unlike before, the campsite is our main focus and we would be working towards making this restricted area as real as possible.

On the 9th of April we will be taking to the Professor over zoom regarding the progress of our project after his comments and will make sure that we are going in the right track by taking in suggestions. After this we would be having exactly three weeks with us to complete our deliverable’s and submit our final working project and scope.

Finally, Week 7! (March 26th)

On 26th we had a review meeting with our Professor talking about where things went wrong in the midterm. We were extremely happy to get critical feedback because this gave us a lot more scope to improve before the final. But this also required modifying the existing terrain structure to highly reduce the scope of the project.

There were many changes told to us and the one which was most crucial is to reduce the size of the terrain. Concentrating only on the campsite was better than taking into account all the paths, water bodies, etc which would in turn unnecessarily increase the scope of the project and all the more give the project a gamified look and feel which was not the intention. The original intention of our project was to create an experience, to make it as close to reality as possible where users could have a first hand experience on how it would feel to be present under such a situation and space.

Remaining of our time this week was used to understand how to efficiently make modifications which would take into consideration Professor’s comments as well as help us save time and not waste more time redoing tasks.

Spring Break! Mar 15th – Mar 23rd!

Unfortunately the COVID – 19 situation around was becoming worse day after day. Keeping aside Spring Break plans we were not able to meet & work on the project as well. We were asked to rest and take care of our health during such an unprecedented time.

Future classes, meetings and discussions would all take place online and via Zoom calls and meetings. We will have a review meeting with Professor in the similar fashion reviewing our Midterm and next steps and the way forward for our project.

Midterm – 03/14/2020

We created a recording of our VR Project from beginning to end as an amalgamation of two scenes (before fire and after fire).

A Voice over was given behind the video by Lakshmi Athivarapu explaining what was going on and how that specific component was important.

We had also documented our plan for the rest of the semester, in detail explained the scope of the project and our timeline for our project during the rest of the semester.

Week 5! (March 5th), We’re close to our Midterm now!

We were able to integrate all the deliverables into the final project. We had to do a bit more work on the campsite to make it look a bit more realistic, after this we had everything we wanted. The fire had the appropriate sound effects and the lighting was dim too, to give a night time look and feel.

We also completed implementing two of our important environment tasks such as – wrapping a moist cloth around the face and immediately calling 911. Once all of this was put together we had another zoom discussion with Professor for his comments and feedback before the Midterm which was two days later.

We took into account his comments, added many more trees, and enhanced the campsite. After tweaking and other modifications we finally came up with the submit-table and recorded a beginning to end video recording of our project for the Midterm submission. We had to do appropriate documentation for the requirements and asks and completed this too in this week for the submission.

We’re on Week 4! (Feb 27th)

This week was very crucial for us, as we had the goal of implementing a lot of new items within this week. It took a few extra hours but at the end we managed to finish what we had decided to do for the week. Moving around the campsite and forest was necessary and hence implemented Teleportation. This allowed us to move around far areas and also walk around the area closed by the HTC Vive’s bounded box. On the other hand, there was a lot of work to be done with the Fire. Fire was first just created in stagnant areas and then was made to look more realistic in further away areas using the Ian’s fire package. Another part of it was to add smoke and appropriate lighting effects. All this was experimented and done in a different test project. Now that all of these components were working individually, we had the upcoming task of integrating all these items coherently into the main project where the terrain was set up.

The third week of work – Feb 20th

Now, we finally started creating the terrain which was the foundation of our project. We used free assets from the asset store and added four different types of coniferous trees typically found in a forest to our terrain. We added a lot of bushes, detailing on the ground, rocks and created a large terrain, which consisted of a campsite, different paths out of which only one would lead towards the water body, water body, an uphill from which you can see the water body so that the user knows to move in that direction.

This week helped us create a foundation and base for our project. This was the time when we had met with Professor again, he asked us to work a lot more on detailing and making the scene look much more realistic. We took in his feedback and were ideating on what kind of modifications we could do the coming week.

Meanwhile Professor also told us that he would be able to provide our team with paid assets from the Unity Store. This would definitely be an add on for our quest on making our project as close to reality as possible. For this, we discussed and requested a list of assets which would be best suited for our project.

The second Week of Work – Feb 13th

This was the time for all of us to really get going. As we were all familiar with our tasks, we have the vision of our project in mind but to be more efficient in what we do, all of us thought it would be impactful if we were learning Unity from various resources on the side, as we were all new to the course. A lot of our time this week was spent by each of us individually polishing ourselves by learning Unity tips and going through tutorials which suited our project goals, so that we could also get a path on how to start implementing our project.

During this time we have come across a Youtube video, which has a complete forest and terrain scene implemented with swamps, trees, bushes, lighting, wind etc. After we finished going through our tutorials for the week, we downloaded this Youtube project and learnt how to use various assets and implement such assets and effects in our own project. Thereafter, this week we spent the rest of our time experimenting around with this project. Learning about the assets and how to use each of them, together with other lighting and post processing effects.