16 February 2011

We had a debrief session with Kevin today. Talked about all the stuff that we had gone through, and Kevin gave us lots of valuable advice.

"Always keep learning, never be the one who knows everything"

This, is really very true. I'm really glad that I've improved since the mid-SIP feedback :) I'm really very thankful to have been attached to IHPC and working with Kevin. He's a really good supervisor. He teaches us not just technical skills, but life skills and social skills as well. Thanks so much Kevin!

Although out internship here would end in just 2 more days, this connection between us would not, I'm sure.

We didn't have the chance to go through the codes today, as Kevin is on half-day today. So I spent the day working a little on my SIP report as well as completing my NUS admission application.

15 February 2011

Well well, it's another day of cleaning codes and trying to get the animation up for me. We managed to go through quite a few number of classes today, and they're our really huge classes.

While doing that, I worked with Bernard and we found out that morph animation has never been converted before. Bernard sent an email to the CTO of NuGraf (they develop plugins for modeling tools) and he managed to clarify some issues with us. He suggested us to export the various meshes in Collada format, and then do the shape blending in our code, which is similar to what was suggested by people in the PowerVR forum for POD files. He also suggested us to look into skinning/bone animations.

Oh yeah, Kevin treated us to lunch today! Zac and I actually planned to buy them (Kevin, Calvin and Bernard) a meal, but looks like Kevin beat us to it. Thanks again Kevin! :D Really appreciate it.

14 February 2011

Last week of internship! I'm seriously gonna miss this place a lot. The people, the environment, the fun, the laughter, the work, everything.

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Started the day by working on producing a scene in 3D Studio Max with the heart models and vertex animation. Since the 3D Studio Max trial on the MacBook has expired, I went over to Bernard's desk to make use of his desktop. He has the license for 3D Studio Max 2008 :)

He's a really nice guy and very helpful! I got the scene up pretty quickly since I've already done it before. Just that this time I have to document a step by step guide on how to get it done. Several screenshots were included as well.

I first exported the scene into .dae format, but it could not be viewed by OS X Preview. Hence, I took some time exporting to all the available formats that I can find, and begun the search for viewer software that can view models with vertex animation. Then again, no luck. All the software that I tried out did not work properly at all. Some were of very old versions too. Looks like lots of research has to be done on vertex animations...

After lunch, I joined Zac and Kevin in reviewing our code and doing some cleaning up.

11 February 2011

Learnt new stuff again today! But before I go into what I've learnt...

Zac and I started the day by getting our application to send the node button location to and fro. This is so that when one user uses the long press gesture to display the node button, all other connected users would also have the button displayed on their devices. Once we got that done, we wondered if the pushing of the views should be done on all connected devices once a user clicks on the button. Gonna have to clarify this with Kevin on Monday~

Once we got that done, I moved into learning how to create morph animations using blender. It's very different from what I have learnt before in 3D Studio Max. At first, I even had difficulty trying to source for tutorials. There were not many specific ones too. Hence, I had to do quite a bit of reading up and understanding how to make use of the Shape Keys. It actually took me a longer time to do this is blender as compared to doing this in 3D Studio Max.

Finally, I was able to get the model up nicely with vertex animation. However, I'm currently facing some issues with displaying the vertex animation in .dae files. It could be either one of these problems:

- Mac OS X Preview doesn't play vertex animation

- .dae does not support vertex animation (but it's stated in the specifications that they do support)

- Exporter issue (blender's website suggests that there are known issues for the Collada importer and exporter for blender, but no details are provided)

10 February 2011

We started the day by fixing up some bugs in our application and did some preparations for the presentation in the afternoon. In order to ensure that we would have a working demo, we did several rounds of testing and debugging. We also discussed on the use case scenario that we would be using to carry out the demo at the same time. This way, we have ensured that we do not miss out anything.

The presentation was done to a few colleagues in the advanced computing department, and it went through quite smoothly I think :)

Through the presentation preparation process, we actually found out that the error that we have been facing with the buffer might be dependent on the network speed! We do not experience any errors when connected to the network in our lightdraw lab. But when we are connected to another network, which is presumably slower, we get the error. Still we cannot be sure though. Wondering what's the root cause of this issue...

08 February 2011

Kevin came in the morning and told us that we were going to do a demo on our project to our colleagues on Thursday. Hence, Zac and I worked on some presentation slides first in preparation for the demo.

After lunch, Kevin took a look at what we have done for the documentations, and we realized that whatever we had done was wrong. We misunderstood what Kevin meant by a user manual, and we did not go into detail for the limitations document. The limitations document was really important, and we had to find out why we're limited, not just state how we're limited.

Therefore, Zac and I then continued with more in depth research on vertex animations for POD files and the issue with our comparison EAGLViews. I found out quite a bit regarding the animations. It is not that the POD file exporter that does not support vertex animations. Instead, it is because POD files do not support vertex animations, which is why the POD file exporter has no need to export the vertex animations at all. Deforming of meshes cannot be done in POD files!

Learnt more about what makes up a software documentation today. Kevin gave us a short session showing to us the technical specifications and the user manual. These 2 documents make up our software documentation. I realized that in TP, we have only been writing technical specifications documents only. Looks like we still got quite a bit to learn if we are required to write the user manual! I don't mind learning that though, it'll definitely be useful in the future.

07 February 2011

Started writing the documents for our project's limitations as well as it's features. We could not write much for the limitations document today though. Several sources that we have comes from the PowerVR forum, and the forum is down today :S

Thus, we decided to complete the features document first which would act like a user manual.