Categorie-archieven: Individual Coaching

Introduction

Here you can read about my personal process and my thoughts about that. Summaries of the sprints are found in the group process chapter. (Those also reflect on personal progress).

My overarching learning goal:

Make a complete and finished product which uses hand tracking to make the experience feel natural and manipulate objects. Also learn how to make a extensive character creator and use the hand tracking for that.

Changes since last feedback round

I did not get feedback on this chapter during the last feedback round, but since my last individual coaching I added two new parts: one and two.

Conclusion and reflection

There three things I want to highlight that I have learned for myself:

1. Leadership skills: you can read this here in the reflection and here.
2. Making adjustments to the testing, you can read this here.
3. Leading the project to a good end by choosing to merge earlier and in a different way. You can read this here. This really contributed to my overarching learning goal.

I think I achieved my overarching learning goal, because of the third point, where I really focused a lot on making the project a complete thing. I also learned a lot about working in an interdisciplinary team. This was really good for me, because I did not know at the beginning what they knew (their expertises but also what their base knowledge about computer stuff was).

My learning goals have developed a lot during this semester and that is way I want to talk about that a bit more.

At the beginning I started with the following learning goals:

Make a complete and finished product which uses hand tracking to make the experience feel natural and manipulate objects. Also learn how to make a extensive character creator and use the hand tracking for that.

1. Learn hand tracking and have it recognize different gestures. Use it to manipulate objects in the environment. Make it feel natural.
2. Make a character creator like The Sims but more extensive, dress up but also molding the model in the game. Merging clothing with the avatar. Have the animation still look good with different accessories.
3. This is a bit vague, but I want to learn what makes a VR/game world alive. I mean this in the way of things like particle systems (e.g. for leaves twirling in the wind), lighting (e.g. make it look like a real sun is shining its rays) and environment sound (for immersion and hearing the world live around you, for example: hearing the wind and the leaves rustling).
4. 3D-modelling, working with textures. Making animations. Making textures that make a low poly character look high detail. (low priority)

During the semester we removed hand tracking from the product which made me move that learning goal to an overarching programming goal en I abandoned the fourth and third goal in exchange for a concepting and design learning goal. I also added the dress-up goal to the programming goal and have the blendshapes be their own goal.

At the end of the semester these are my learning goals:

Make a complete and finished product which uses hand tracking to make the experience feel natural and manipulate objects. Also learn how to make a extensive character creator and use the hand tracking for that.

1. Become a better programmer:
   1. Make a dress-up system in the game and have it work efficiently (for example the throwable/environment versions of clothing).
   2. Learn about hand tracking and have it recognize different gestures.
   3. Hold myself to higher standards in terms of naming files/variables.
   4. Hold my code to higher standards (see throwable/environment link above).
2. Learn about making blend shapes in blender and using them in Unity.
3. Learn about concepting and designing a product from beginning to end.

Reflection

I learned a lot about what I want to learn and I also learned that it is okay to change your goals during the semester. For example there was not time for me to also start modelling and there were already two other people doing that, so it was not feasible to have that as a goal any more.

Specifically because of the problems with git and because I know from previous sprints and previous projects that merging can take a lot longer than you think, I started merging at the start of the last week. I did not merge via git, but I imported everything the others made myself when they finished something new.

I also immediately tested everything while implementing things so that I was sure everything worked, this made me catch problems early on, for example that the cloth constraints could not be copied over. If I had noticed this after I had replaced all the clothing I would have had a lot more work with undoing everything.

Reflection

This is something I spoke about with Lisette and she told me this is something I have grown a lot in and I agree with this. This also contributed to my wish of making a finished product that is one whole thing with a beginning and an end and (almost) no game breaking bugs.

During the fourth testing friday I tried to test my blend shape system but I noticed that no one saw the character changing shapes. This disappointed me because I worked really hard on this. I talked about it with Lisette and she asked me if I couldn’t make the blend shapes bigger and I didn’t think I could do that in time before the next testers.

I started thinking after that and suddenly came up with an idea based on the thing Lisette said and I tried putting the blend shapes higher than the maximum in Unity and it worked. It also didn’t look too bad so that was a plus.

Reflection

From this I learned that even the most complicated (in my mind) things can most of the times be easily adjusted by a “hack”. For example during testing like I described above.

I got the feedback from teachers that they wanted to be able to view my progress per learning goal. I am doing this in this article. You can read the previous article about my learning goals here.

Chapters

• Hand Tracking
• Character Creator
  • Dress-up system
  • Blend shapes
• Concepting and Design
• Modelling etc.
  • Modelling
• Making the environment feel alive
  • Particles
  • Lighting

Hand Tracking

Learn hand tracking and have it recognize different gestures. Use it to manipulate objects in the environment. Make it feel natural.

My first goal was about hand tracking. This one has since been finished, because we do not use hand tracking in our project anymore. My progress on hand tracking can be read here (in order of date):

1. Individual Coaching 21/09/2021
   • This is where I defined my learning goal about hand tracking.
2. Hand Tracking
3. Hand Tracking Gestures
4. First Testing Friday
   • This is where we tested the hand tracking for the first time.
5. Individual Coaching 13/10/2021
   • This is where I discussed my learning goal again.
6. Hand Tracking Grabbing objects
7. Second Testing Friday
   • This is where we got feedback about the hand tracking which we used in the next sprint.
8. The removal of hand tracking
9. Learning Progress Showcase
   • This is where I showed my new knowledge about hand tracking to students and teachers.
10. Third Testing Friday
    • This is where we tested with test participants whether they liked hand tracking or controllers better.
11. Removing hand tracking 2

Reflection (06/12/2021)

Yes, I am of course sad that we will not use hand tracking anymore, but it is better for the project and I can always learn this in a future project and then I will have an advantage because I have experience from this project.

Character Creator

Make a character creator like The Sims but more extensive, dress up but also molding the model in the game. Merging clothing with the avatar. Have the animation still look good with different accessories.

My second goal is about making a character creator. This can be divided into two goals. One: making a system to dress up a character and the second being blend shapes to model the character in game.

1. Individual Coaching 21/09/2021
   • This is where I defined my goal for the first time.
2. Learning Progress Showcase
3. Blend Shapes on clothing pieces idea
   • This is my idea to make clothing able to fit on every blend shaped model in the game.

Dress-up system:

1. Blend shapes
2. Second Testing Friday
   • This is where the player could grab clothing but the dress-up system did not work yet.
3. Clothing rack idea
4. Making the character wear clothing
5. Importing blender clothing into Unity
   • This is where I made clothing ready for use for in Unity.
6. Third Testing Friday
   • This is where we tested my dress-up system with test participants. Spoiler-alert: everyone liked it!
7. Sprint Review Third Sprint
   • This is where we showed the teachers and the company what we made and the teachers really liked the dress-up part.

Blend shapes:

1. Blend Shapes
   • This is about my first adventure with blend shapes.
2. Sprint Review Second Sprint
   • This is where I convinced everyone to not use standard sizing so that I would not lose my learning goal.
3. Retrospective 3
   • This is where I told the group my worries about not having enough time for this goal.
4. Making blend shapes in blender

Reflection (06/12/2021)

I am now starting on the blend shapes during this sprint and I have made the dress-up system during the previous sprint. I am having a lot of fun with these two things and I cannot wait to see how much I have learned at the end of this sprint. I am also going to make the dress-up system easier to use during this sprint.

Concepting and Design

I want to learn more about designing how our game will work, things like smart solutions to make the game easier and thinking of improvements. I also want to make it easier for the company and the teachers (and ourselves!) to understand the game flow, for example by making storyboards.

This is a learning goal which I haven’t previously described while I have been working on it. This goal is about designing how things work in the game and working on the concept. For example: making storyboards and designing the bees presence in the game.

Before the Shoeby project:

1. Ideation and Brainstorming
2. Ideation and Brainstorming 2
3. Brown Boxing
4. White Boxing
5. Testing white boxing prototype
6. Story Telling
7. Pressure Cooker: Candy Sorter

During the Shoeby project:

1. Concepts for companies
2. First Storyboard
3. Storyboard
4. Designing the Shoe-bee
   • Drawing the Shoe-bee, I still need to explain it’s behaviour and function in a new article in the future.
5. Development of the Shoeby concept
6. The removal of hand tracking
7. Learning Progress Showcase
   • This is where I showed my progress on the concepting and design topic to Emma and she gave me the feedback to write my learning goal down, because I had not done that prior to this meeting.
8. Blend Shapes on clothing pieces idea
9. Clothing rack idea
10. Third Testing Friday
    • This is where we tested with thought out testing methods for the first time, like A/B-testing.
11. Removing hand tracking 2
12. Redesign to make removing teleportation possible
    • I had a design session with Ebru to reimagine the environment object placement so that the user won’t need to teleport.

Reflection (06/12/2021)

It is really easy to keep up to date with this learning goal, because during our project we have always been thinking of new things and having to redesign things. For example redesigning the environment to make removing teleportation possible. This was something that we still had to do and we did it in between our normal tasks. Improving the concept is a thing that is always on your mind. I also like working together with Ebru and Frederique for this, because they have a good/different feeling for this because of their different education.

Trying out modelling and other designing things

Trying out 3D-modelling and trying out animations. I want to learn the modelling via the Medium app from Adobe in VR and using blender for blend shapes.

I want to do some designing things to get better at them, but it is not my main focus. I really like doing this, but I want to do it in small steps so I do not get sucked in too much and I stop focusing on my other goals. This is why I have thought of things I want to do beforehand and focus on those things. These things are modelling in VR with Medium, making blend shapes in blender, drawing the controllers for the in-game explanation and drawing the Shoe-bee and the last thing is animating the controllers for the in-game explanation.

Modelling:

Before the Shoeby project:

1. Blender

During the Shoeby project:

1. Individual Coaching 21/09/2021
   • Defining my learning goals.
2. Experimenting with modelling in VR
3. Blend Shapes
4. Importing blender clothing into Unity
   • Working in blender to fix some issues with models.

Drawing:

1. Designing the Shoe-bee

Reflection (06/12/2021)

I am okay with my progress so far, because I know I will learn more during this sprint and next sprint. During this sprint I will model more blend shapes and in the next sprint I will model the Shoe-bee and animate the controller explanation.

Making the environment feel alive

This is a bit vague, but I want to learn what makes a VR/game world alive. I mean this in the way of things like particle systems (e.g. for leaves twirling in the wind), lighting (e.g. make it look like a real sun is shining its rays) and environment sound (for immersion and hearing the world live around you, for example: hearing the wind and the leaves rustling).

The above quote has a good explanation for the things that I want to learn as this learning goal. My progress:

Particles:

Lighting:

Reflection (06/12/2021)

I have not been able to work on this goal yet, but that will soon change. During this sprint I will work on the lighting and next sprint I will work on the particles.

On this day we had the learning progress showcase, where we spoke to teachers and students to get feedback on various topics from our portfolio. We also had to give feedback to each other in our groups.

The first teachers I spoke to were Lisette and Kees and the most important bit of feedback from them was that I need to learn more new things from my teammates instead of only observing them doing things that are new for me. I am going to work together with Frederique by combining our programming/modelling knowledge to make clothing dynamics this sprint. This will help with implementing that feedback.

The next teacher I spoke to was Emma who I talked with about concepting and modelling and she gave me a lot of good tips for how to progress further with blendshapes, like what I could search for online and that I should get a lot of opinions on how the avatar should look in the various blendshapes. She also told me I should write my goal about storyboards and concepting in my portfolio and that it would be wise to make a page for each specific goal and write how I am progressing in it.

The last teacher I spoke to was Remco about programming. From him the biggest feedback was that I should have a new thing that I learn that is only from me (which should be the blendshapes). This was because he did not like that Scott and I both learned about hand tracking (even though we did it seperate from each other). And I also should have something made by me only that has a big impact on the game. I will probably automatically work on this during the next sprint because I will be the only programmer for this time. I am going to focus on programming things like the controller interactions and then the blendshapes.

Another thing I took from the feedback is that I should make goals more well thought out and do more research prior to starting work, for example looking into more ways to accomplish user input/hand tracking before sticking to one tutorial. I should not take too long doing this, but I should have more insight into how things work and if there will be implications like hand tracking teleportation not working before I start.

My team did not have time to do feedback for each other on this day, so we will do this later and then I will write it in my portfolio. Also, my feedback form is not complete so I will ask the teacher during the individual coaching about this before I upload it.

After a lot of thinking my current learning goals are:

Make a complete and finished product which uses hand tracking to make the experience feel natural and manipulate objects. Also learn how to make a extensive character creator and use the hand tracking for that.

1. Learn hand tracking and have it recognize different gestures. Use it to manipulate objects in the environment. Make it feel natural.
   • I have already done a lot with this in the first few weeks. Because hand tracking is an integral part of our game we implemented it immediately at the start of development. It was really fun and I love seeing how you can use your own hands in VR. I also helped Scott to figure out how he can change some code to make teleportation work with hand tracking. We also made gesture recognition that we used for my blendshape prototype. You can read about hand tracking here and about gestures here.
2. Make a character creator like The Sims but more extensive, dress up but also molding the model in the game. Merging clothing with the avatar. Have the animation still look good with different accessories.
   • I am currently working on this by making blend shapes and working with an asset in Unity that can make avatars wear clothing. You can read about the asset here and about blend shapes here.
3. This is a bit vague, but I want to learn what makes a VR/game world alive. I mean this in the way of things like particle systems (e.g. for leaves twirling in the wind), lighting (e.g. make it look like a real sun is shining its rays) and environment sound (for immersion and hearing the world live around you, for example: hearing the wind and the leaves rustling).
4. 3D-modelling, working with textures. Making animations. Making textures that make a low poly character look high detail.
   • This is an old description. My focus has shifted a bit. I do still want to make animations and textures, but the modelling is of a lower priority except that I want to experiment with it in VR with the Medium app from Adobe.

This was my second coaching session and this time it was with Kees. We talked about how it is going and what was worrying me.

I was worried about the progress of the project because every time we get feedback and we need to change the entire concept again. We also talked about this with other teachers and one thing is that we need to take it more lightly and make our own decisions. Kees also said that I should leave the reworking of the concept to Ebru and Frederique and work on something that is definitely going to be in the concept like the Shoe-bee. He also said that I should finalize my learning goals and work on my portfolio because I was missing a lot.

He also said that I should not work on the hand tracking for a while because that is Scott’s learning goal, but this was a misunderstanding that I will need to explain to Kees later, since the hand tracking was my big learning goal and Scott also did it. Scott later also said that I need to keep working on hand tracking because it is such a big goal of mine and he also said that Kees misunderstood it. So in the next coaching session I will bring this up and remove the misunderstanding. (I was too shocked to bring it up during the meeting so that is why I did not bring it up immediately.)

What I learned from this is that I need to keep focussing on what I want to do and make that my own priority.

Today I had my first individual coaching session with the teacher. We talked about how the semester is going and what I want to learn. The things I have to focus on right now are: thinking of what I want to learn and experimenting with 3D-modelling to see if I like it. For this I am going to experiment in Blender and Gravity Sketch. I am also going to research about the program Substance Painter. The things that I already know that I would like to learn/try are:

• Hand tracking
• Making a character creator where you can customize the character a lot (like in The Sims but way more)
• How to make a good and attractive environment
• Working with textures (to make a high detail, low poly model) (maybe)
• Making animations (maybe)
• UI Design look and feel