iPhone Application: Copenhagen Mirror

by Marcus on December 5, 2010

I’m now on the 5th semester of Medialogy, and we’re currently developing an iPhone application. The application lets the user use the iPhone as a camera that looks back in time, i.e. if you’re standing at Christiansborg in Copenhagen and point the iPhone at the building you should see how the area looked 500 or 1000 years ago. We also wanted this environment to be interactive, i.e. the user should be able to walk and look around. This means that we wanted to model a 3D environment of the area and synchronise the position of the user in real life to the position in this 3D environment, and also allow the user to use the iPhone as virtual reality goggles, i.e. if you tilt the iPhone upwards you see the sky, if you turn around you see what’s behind you in the 3D world, etc.

We’ve been making the models in Maya and building the application itself in Unity, since it has a pretty strong iOS support. All scripts in Unity are programmed in C#.

Basically the application will have the following features:

  • User can move around by physically moving (Assisted GPS).
  • User can look around by using the iPhone as a camera into another world (Gyroscope).
  • Weather conditions in 3D environment mimic real-life weather conditions (Network connection to DMI).
    • Position of sun is calculated based on current date and time.
    • Lighting conditions are calculated by using online information about solar radiation.
  • A graphical user interface allows the user to switch between time periods.

The application is currently running on my iPhone 4, but I have no video of it, so here’s a screenshot from Unity where one of the newer editions of Christiansborg is displayed.

We do have some screenshots from the application, though:

This is from an early build, no textures on the buildings or anything, but the gyro works, i.e. you can look around the environment by turning and moving the iPhone.

This is from the newest build. The model is the Christiansborg castle  which was there before the current one. The image is dark because the sun’s location is calculated from the real sun, and it’s gone down at this point. The arrows allow you to switch between castles.

My First 3D Models

by Marcus on September 19, 2010

I just started on the 5th semester of Medialogy which focuses a lot on 3D-modeling in Maya, and I’d like to show you my first 3D models! Our assignment was to make a town square with a statue or a fountain, and I tried to make a forest village, kind of like the one the Ewoks live in. So, without further ado:

Tutorial: Mesh Render in Maya

by Marcus on September 19, 2010

This is a write-up of this video, mostly so I don’t have to watch the video every time I want to mesh render something.

  1. Go to “Windows” -> “Rendering Editors” -> “Hypershade”.
  2. Create a new Lambert shader, and open its attributes.
    1. Set “Color” to black.
    2. Set “Diffuse” to 0.
  3. Right-click-hold on shader to assign it to all objects.
  4. Click “Output” icon in shader attributes (arrow in a box next to “Presets”.
  5. Open “mental ray”, and “Contours”.
    1. Tick on “Enable Contour Rendering”.
    2. Set “Color” to white.
    3. Set “Width” to 0.25 or 0.5.
  6. Go to “Windows” -> “Rendering Editors” -> “Render Settings”.
  7. Set “Render Using” to “mental ray”.
  8. Go to “Features” tab, and open “Rendering Features”.
    1. Set “Primary Render” to “Raytracing” under “Rendering Features”.
    2. Set “Secondary Effects” to “Raytracing” under “Rendering Features”.
  9. Open “Contours” in the same tab.
    1. Tick on “Enable Contour Rendering”.
    2. Set “Over-Sample” to 3.
    3. Set “Filter Type” to “Gaussian Filter”.
  10. Open “Draw By Property Difference” in the same tab.
    1. Tick on “Around all poly faces”.
  11. Render your image, and you should see something like this:

USA 2010: First Post

by Marcus on August 15, 2010

In a couple of hours I’m going to Amsterdam and then Los Angeles via New York tomorrow! This is mainly to test plugins for the blog. :)

At home! Leaving soon.

 

A few thoughts about Inception

by Marcus on July 29, 2010

I just came back from watching Inception, and I don’t know why, but it did not really impact me as much as I had hoped. It wasn’t really a cinematic experience the same way, say, The Dark Knight was. However, I still really, really liked it, and it’s a long time since I’ve seen such an original movie. But I do have some problems with the film, and I want to write down a specific problem, while I can still remember the movie.

I like confusing movies that make sense or can be explained logically if you take the time to think about them, e.g. Primer, Memento, or Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. On the other hand, I don’t like movies that are confusing and in which everything is more or less ambiguous, like Inland Empire. Those kinds of movies usually feel like sloppy work to me. For the most part, Inception falls in the first category, but in the end of the movie the established rules kind of take a dive. Fischer (Cillian Murphy) dies on dream level 3, and naturally goes to limbo, because he’s sedated in real life. Ariadne (Ellen Page) and Cobb (Leonardo DiCaprio) follow him, because using the dreaming machine on level 3 apparently takes you to limbo, fair enough. But now, in limbo, Ariadne kills Fischer by dropping him off the building, and what happens? He wakes up on the 3rd level! Yes, they used the defibrillator at the same time, but how does that make sense? If he goes to level 3 by dying in limbo, shouldn’t he also have gone to level 2 by dying on level 3? This somewhat ruined the ending for me.