Week 3 and 4 Update: 3D content migration woes

This update is coming in late, as I’ve been trying to come up with some way to explain the difficulties I’m facing with this project, while also respecting the privacy and IP. I’m leaning heavy on metaphor, but…

Imagine there are three people sitting at a bar. One of them speaks Dutch, English, and German (but only okay German, not great). Another speaks Spanish, some English (okay-ish grammar, few nouns), and fluent German. The last person at the table is a little bit unusual. They’re a rapper from Japan, they speak fluent Japanese and a little English. As a child they were an exchange student in Germany, but they’ve forgotten most of what they learned. The rapper also insists on speaking-as-quickly-as-their-mouth-can-run. They never slow down. Speed is everything.

They all have some overlap, however imperfect, in their spoken languages, but none can understand each other perfectly. This is what it feels like to develop assets for a still-in-beta realtime engine, while leveraging a parametric modeler, an open source 3D creator tool, and adhering to standards from a professional VFX and CGI-specific 3D tool.

This week my primary focus has been on getting Blender and Unreal Engine to talk to each other. Unreal prefers FBX file format (Autodesk Maya Native). Blender can export most data in this format, but there are a few catches:

• No shape keys

• Subdivision data is limited to a single iteration

• Dynamic animation can only be exported with baked physics, and is limited to vertices and face transformations (kind of, depending on what you’re doing).

Additionally, Unreal doesn’t quite understand Blender’s material system. It will still export textures and UV map data, but you’ll need to build the material blueprint to recreate whatever you have in Blender. It is far from being a 1:1 exchange.

There are also a many weird quirks:

In Blender, the default units are meters. In Unreal, the default unit is centimeters. Before exporting from Blender, you need to set Unit Scale to 0.01. If you switch units in Blender to centimeters and leave the Unit Scale at the default of 1.0, then you’ll experience strange anomalies for things like collider bodies, skeleton mesh, etc..

In naming the rigging elements (IK skeletons, etc.), you DO NOT name any bones “root,” because Unreal will assume a hierarchy which may differ from your hierarchy (parenting) in Blender. However, you may rename the Armature container to “root” to conform to Unreal’s hierarchy.

Lastly, the only rigging data that reliably translates between Blender and Unreal Engine are deform bones and baked animations/transformations.

I’ve reached a stumbling block with my current 3D character. I can rig the character to animate, and even output that data in a manner which Unreal Engine can interpret. This comes at the expense of a vital visual element that was procedurally generated. What comes next is a difficult choice:

I can either integrate procedurally generated elements into a single mesh geometry (potentially compromising some rendering performance and visual fidelity) but without having to rework existing animation and rigging, or I can attempt to recreate the procedural mesh instancing I developed inside Blender but natively within Unreal. The former will be labor intensive, but I understand the tools well enough to work consistently toward a known output. The latter involves many unknowns, but I will also gain a deeper understanding of workflows within Unreal Engine. I’m attracted to this latter option, but I don’t know if it is best for the client and their expectations.

Week 12 Update: Evaluative Research Presentation and Reflection on Reaching The Project's Final Stage

This week our team presented our evaluative research to Prospect Studio (Fiona and other representatives were asynchronous for this session) and our guest, Arnold Wasserman. This presentation is the last before our final deliverable, and represents the conclusion of our research phase. While there are some loose ends for us to address (and further evaluation of our concept has not yet been attempted), we are now in the early stages of artifact synthesis.

The last few weeks have helped our team to understand the importance of user evaluation, what strategies do and do not work well in a remote/online context. In particular, we learned that building a survey is a miniature design project unto itself. The creation of an interactive system, and evaluating the results required significant labor up front and a lot of uncertainty throughout. Nevertheless, I feel that our team was successful in achieving specific goals.

I’m proud to say that we managed to get several different concepts in front of several educators from around the country as well as from within PPS specifically. We successfully navigated and sorted through feedback to gauge overall patterns of responses to several concepts as well as system-level evaluations. We managed to coordinate and divide our labor effectively, and communicated asynchronously as we brought key components together. This process was mirrored in the creation of our latest slide deck for Wednesday.
We received helpful feedback and challenges to our concept following our team’s presentation. As previously has been the case, our team had a good sense of who ought to respond to specific questions, since our divided labor has granted each team member some degree of specialization and familiarity with the topic we’ve been researching. Specifically, Arnold Wasserman was curious about how our artifacts could communicate these concepts in a compelling and persuasive manner. Arnold Wasserman pointed out that school boards and the people elected to them, have a tendency to be self-serving, to the detriment of the districts they represent. He questioned how our concepts would overcome the significant obstacle of implementation, especially given the fact that school boards and public officials hold the levers of power and the teachers are functionally an underclass in the United States.

This is something I’ve been thinking about since the beginning of this project, and I related back to these thoughts in response. My ideas are largely based on the work of Donella Meadows, and her famous essay on leverage points.

PLACES TO INTERVENE IN A SYSTEM

(in increasing order of effectiveness)

12. Constants, parameters, numbers (such as subsidies, taxes, standards).
11. The sizes of buffers and other stabilizing stocks, relative to their flows.
10. The structure of material stocks and flows (such as transport networks, population age structures).
9. The lengths of delays, relative to the rate of system change.
8. The strength of negative feedback loops, relative to the impacts they are trying to correct against.
7. The gain around driving positive feedback loops.
6. The structure of information flows (who does and does not have access to information).
5. The rules of the system (such as incentives, punishments, constraints).
4. The power to add, change, evolve, or self-organize system structure.
3. The goals of the system.
2. The mindset or paradigm out of which the system — its goals, structure, rules, delays, parameters — arises.
1. The power to transcend paradigms.

In particular, look at points three and four: the power to self organize and the goals of the system are key to understanding the forces necessary to reform PPS to more closely resemble the vision from Prospect Studio. I agree with Arnold Wasserman’s observation regard the school boards and policy makers, but I also see a real opportunity with this difficult and problematic group. They hold the levers, so we need only find a way to align their goals with the reforms we envisions for PPS.

If we accept the premise that politicians and school board members care about their own tenure and individual interests, and do so above all other considerations, then what we need to produce are artifacts that provokes the parents and registered voters of that school district. Once an activated and inspired public knows what they desire, they will vote for and ultimately elect representatives who promise to bring that vision to life. We have seen this on matters ranging from civil rights and infrastructure, to economics and war. Politicians will follow public pressure to keep their own seats warm.

Arnold seemed pleased with my answer, and suggested that our topic relates directly to the fate of our nation’s democracy — so, no pressure at all!

This weekend our team held three meetings to jumpstart this process of future artifact synthesis, and we have been more or less fruitful in this endeavor. It’s exciting to be in the final stretch, but our team has been struggling to maintain momentum lately. The demands of presentation weeks, and the rush to complete our research, often requires long hours, multiple zoom meetings outside of class, and many late nights. This has began to produce negative health consequences for our team.

We’ve been intensely looking at teacher burnout, but have also been confronted with the burnout of a pandemic, and the rigorous academics of a graduate program. Illness, headaches, and signs of exhaustion have crept into our team dynamic, and I’m concerned about what this will mean now that we are heading into the final push for this semester. What we really need at this stage is that spark of creativity and divergent thinking. It’s hard to do this level of work while also pushing up against the steady hum of stress and exhaustion.

Brainstorming session, mapping events and trends to eventual implementation of key ARC concepts

I think it was a gigantic error on the part of CMU to breakup our spring break. I understand the rationale, and the concerns around travel, but this alternative strategy of giving students a random Monday or Tuesday off has not provided the benefits of time off to rest. I simply cannot “sleep faster” when given a 24 hour window, and I cannot catch up when one day of classes is omitted from an otherwise packed calendar. I’m burned out. I’ve got this strange ringing in my ear that won’t let up, and I’m having more trouble concentrating than at any other time this year.

Languishing in the fog of constant deadlines, constant tasks, constant meetings, constant emails, Slack messages, updates, etc., etc., have left me depleted. It has also sucked the joy out of doing this work. I hope this terrible mental and physical state doesn’t last, because I don’t see how I can be productive while feeling this way.

Prototyping for IxD - Case Study

Information Architecture: Frankie Bunz

Pittsburgh, PA

One other component worth considering in the context of the customer journey and user experience (see my previous post), is the Information Architecture of the food menu. Let’s take another look at the menu:

There are a total of three menus at Frankie Bunz: one in the window, one on the ordering counter, and a handwritten banner inside the restaurant.

The Food

There are eight standardized options:

The Frankie Bunz

The Don

The Hyman Roth

The Fredo’s Frank

The Sonny Special

The Henry Hill

The Mr. Miyagi Doggie

The Grateful Dog

The Chairman of the Dog

Customers choosing a standard dog still have the option to add additional toppings (more about this later), and must choose from one of four bun types*:

White

Wheat

Pretzel

Onion

*The only exception is the “Mr. Miyagi Doggie” which is an Asian Fusion spin on the classic corndog - featuring a tempura batter and side of slaw with special “dragon sauce.”

There is also an option to “B.Y.O.D” (Build Your Own Dog) with six dog options:

Smith’s Natural Skin Casing Hot Dog

Jubilee Farms All Beef Hot Dog

Hebrew National

Spicy Beef Dog

Turkey Dog

Veggie Dog

Toppings

There are two categories of toppings*:

“Frankie’s Fresh”

Premium

*The premium incurs a $1 charge per selection.

There are eleven “Frankie’s Fresh” toppings:

Ketchup

Mustard (Yellow, Dark, and Honey)

Siracha Mayo

Fresh Sauerkraut

Pickles

Onions (sweet vidalia)

Hot Peppers

Relish (sweet and dill)

And there are seven Premium toppings:

Chili Sauce

Bacon (candied)

Avocado

American cheese

Shredded, aged cheddar

Swiss

Pepper Jack

Sandwiches

If hot dogs are not your thing, they also offer large sides as well as grilled cheese sandwiches.

Grilled cheese sandwiches offer three options for bread:

White

Wheat

Sourdough

and four options for cheese*:

American

Swiss

Aged Cheddar

Pepper Jack

*Customers may select any combination, up to and including all four on the same sandwich

Customers may add any of the fourteen (fresh and premium) toppings offered for hotdogs to their grilled cheese (see above).*

*Customers can also add any choice of the six dogs (see above) for $2

There are also five standardized grilled cheese (with choice of bread), offered as a “daily special” Monday through Friday.

Sides

The only side offered are their fries.

There are four options to select from:

Regular

With melted cheese

“Da Woiks” (i.e., chili cheese fries with bacon)

"Poutini” (i.e., cheese curds, house gravy, and scallions)

Drinks

There are six fountain drinks (one cup size) and sixteen bottled drinks available. I won’t list them here; they offer Pepsi products, and you can see the options for yourself:

Information Architecture

As you can see, there are many, many choices for customers to make. However, the choices have a logical flow and can be reduced to discrete categories with a linear progression.

A minimum of five choices must be made to complete an order.

Dead Star Escape Playtests at XOXOFest 2018

XOXOFest gave me an opportunity to conduct some playtests for DEAD STAR ESCAPE! It’s a four-player tabletop, where space pirates try to escape from a black hole! I got some excellent feedback on this project and still have a lot of work ahead of me, but it was really exciting to see a game play through from start to finish with new players. The play mechanics and rules are ironed out, but I still need to update the prototype and enhance some layout and other misc. concerns.