Thursday, January 31, 2013

Papers on Papers on Papers + Unity

I've been reading through the research papers that are related to my project and 1) there are SO many papers related to character animation/ multi-player interactions/fighting/interactive character control that I could/want to read it was really hard to just pick a few 2) I forgot how dense research papers are... It's taking a while.

Also I found a tutorial on lynda.com for Unity that I've been working through. It's a pretty interesting interface, not very button heavy like Maya. I've never been into making games that much but it's a pretty cool environment because you don't have to worry about writing rendering code to see your stuff.

It's looking like I may need to capture some motions though...

Friday, January 18, 2013

Sword Fighting Through Senior Year

I'm finally in my last semester as an undergraduate!

This semester I'm doing my senior design project. It was so hard to think of something possible and interesting, but with the help of my advisor Dr. Stephen Lane, I've settled on creating a sword fighting simulator that will (hopefully) be interactive. I'm interested in character animation in general, but I'm specifically interested in this project because I think the concepts could be generalized to other sports like football (my favorite!).

The main aspect of interest here is that the animations are calculated based on min/max approximated game tree search. I was unfamiliar with game trees before, but it seems like a really versatile algorithm.

I'll also be using Unity for the first time. So far I've downloaded it and I'm working through some tutorials. I guess this is the time to try new things!

I only need two credits to pass and one of them is this project (although I'm taking three for the sake of being a full time student) --- Here we go!