Daghir: Independent Learning Blog

For my independent learning experience, I learned how to use Rogo Digital's Lipsync, an external plugin for Unity (like Playmaker). This plugin allows you to sync an audio file with facial animations, allowing your characters to come to life with dialogue. The plugin has some issues and a bit of a learning curve, but it is very powerful and has excellent developer support. Lipsync works by mapping "phonemes," or specific sounds, to different facial movements. Sometimes, different sounds are produced by making the same mouth shape (i.e., M, B, and P...

Assignment 6 – Josh Daghir

In the complexities of crafting a visually compelling virtual world, it is easy to forget the importance of sound in creating a fully immersive experience. If virtual reality is meant to transport the user to a new world, then the more senses involved, the more complete the experience feels. Much like video, capturing sound for VR purposes is extremely different from traditional audio recording. How sound is captured in 3D space greatly impacts the polish of the final product. There are many tools to capture 3D sound. I find binaural...

Assignment 5 – Josh Daghir

Link to my scene in WebGL Capturing 3D objects in reality and translating them into virtual reality has been the most difficult assignment of this class yet. A combination of factors on both the user end and the software end make 3D capture hard to execute. My trouble first started with 123D Catch. The idea of being able to capture 3D models straight from your phone is compelling, but the software is simply not strong enough to create good models. I tried capturing objects in bright, even lighting, and usually...

Assignment 2 – Josh Daghir

Josh Daghir I expected using Unity to be extremely difficult for me, but after creating my first scene, I realized that I have done things like this before. When Prof. Pacheco was mentioning the student who brought his origami to class, I thought, “I must not be a 3-D thinker, I’ve always been terrible with origami and sculpture and any other 3-D project that students do in a high school art class.” But after working with the software, I realized that this type of work is what I loved to...