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.

01 February 2011

Continued with research on the animation and comparison issues today! It's Chinese New Year eve tomorrow and I'm feeling so excited~

31 January 2011

Wow, it's already the last day of January 2011! In just the blink of an eye and we've already spent 1 month of the new year.

It's bug solving day today. Found quite a number of bugs in our application as we carried out some testing. Spent most of the time trying to fix the downloading of model loaded by server if not found in directory. It was working previously since we have yet to send any additional data over to the client. However, once we added the part where we had to send over the initial model state, the problem arises. The application tries to apply the model states even though the model has yet to complete the download.

We thought about it for a long time and in the end decided to make use of an array to store the received data while the client is still downloading the model. The received data would then be applied when the download has completed.

That was problem number 1 solved. We then had to deal with the issue of selecting nodes to draw/hide. The table view's check mark was not being updated. This was solved pretty quickly. Problem number 2 down.

We also faced the problem of user trying to perform interactions even though no model has been loaded yet. This would cause the application to crash. Simple solution - enable user interactions only when model has been loaded.

Oh yeah, Bernard took us to the Marketplace today for lunch. We each bought the wrap meal @ $4.50 and brought it to our pantry. There a wrap, a drink, as well as a small dish of fruits. Healthy lunch!

28 January 2011

We had a discussion with Kevin today to talk about the things we need to complete before our internship ends. There were 3 main things:

- Research on Animation and model preparation

- Research on the Compare issue

- Work on axis resetting for translation (Probably with the use of quartenions? We would have to seek help from Calvin regarding this.)

Hence, after the discussion, we went on with our research for the animations.