05.14.18

Took the AP Physics C exams today.

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Weekly update #52

Not much I can report on. Finished the gallery mesh early on in the week. After that I was not able to make much progress because of certain claims being leveraged against me. I hope next week is better, but it probably won't be. I am no longer expecting to finish my project before I graduate. I am exasperated; no matter how hard I work, how many hours of my free time I put into ISR, or how polite I am to authority figures in the Elab, I am shut down time and time again. Yes, after a year and a half of protesting strictures that inhibit my progress and unwarranted hostile responses from personnel that I had been polite to and had gone out of my way to be friendly toward in the past, I got pretty fed up and began to lose my cool. It starts to wear you down when students that spend their time in the monitoring lab ONLY watching youtube videos receive constant praise for their "hard work" and are showered with accolades for projects that never became functional and have since gone untouched for months on end. It sucks when your top-choice college visits your school and you are not even given the time by your teacher to give the admissions representative a brief overview of your project.

Trust me when I say that I will remember this.

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05.11.18

Today I went to track states.

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05.10.18

Today I studied for APs in the middle room.

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05.08.18

Today I finished refining the gallery mesh! I work during G period (my off), from the end of C period until 10 minutes before the beginning of D period, then through F period, and then after school until 5:30. I plan to import the finished mesh to Unity soon to replace the old crappy model. I also began importing the middle room mesh to Autodesk 3Ds Max, but Mr. H had to leave before it finished importing. I will look at it again tomorrow and hopefully begin to edit it.

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Weekly update #51

This week I played around on both Unity and Autodesk 3Ds Max.

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04.26.18

Today I played around with the ambient occlusion settings in Unity that I found last class. I changed up some settings on the occlusion maps and applied them. It took most of the period to bake and did not finish before the end of class. I will check back up on it next class.

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04.24.18

Today I tried to fix the lighting in Unity. The middle room model actually looks pretty good in terms of structure, but the texture is iffy and the material needs updating. During like the last minute of class I noticed a button that said "ambient occlusion" on the left-hand side of the window after selecting the middle room object in the scene. I will play around with that later.

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04.23.18

Today I tried to edit but I spent most of my time waiting for 3Ds Max to load the project. While I was waiting I wrote this weblog [meta].

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Weekly update #50

This week I worked on reimporting assets in Unity and editing the gallery mesh in 3Ds Max. When I mentioned the gallery mesh wouldn't load in high enough resolution, George suggested that I check the viewport settings on 3Ds Max. It worked. I do not know how he knew it, but I'm stoked. I can now edit the mesh in high detail. The viewport settings are available simply by clicking the [+] in the top left-hand corner of the viewer (where you see the mesh). In order to get a high res view, the pixels per inch or whatever need to be =< 2400.

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04.17.18

Today I worked more on Unity. I also updated Unity to v. 5.6.3, which took a looooooong time. In the meantime, I worked on www.projectexpandedreality.com.

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04.16.18

Today I imported the middle room model to the Unity scene. I also successfully imported the texture. I spent the remainder of the class as well as my off period working on the lighting of the scene and ambient occlusion. I am hoping it will cooperate.

Plan for the final presentation:
I have created a website for my project already, and I have taken many screenshots of my progress that are not yet displayed on the site. I will talk about my experimenting with Autodesk, Unity, Reality Capture, etc., and summarize my two years in ISR briefly. I will then introduce Pikoi and explain how he will continue the project.

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Weekly update #49

This week I tried to edit the gallery mesh using 3Ds Max and RecapPro but it wouldn't load in high enough resolution to be operable. In the end, no matter how much I edited the mesh, it came out no better than it had unedited in Unity. Friday I opened up Unity and found all the assets had been misplaced. I expect I will have to search around the Hydra for them next week. Hopefully it won't take too long to find them.

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04.13.18

Today I did more editing in 3Ds Max. I think that the issue is the degradation of the mesh's resolution upon being imported. I will try to fix this issue on Monday. I also tinkered around with Unity again today. All of the scenes that we had made are missing because of the archival and organization of the various storage disks. It's a lot of fun because Unity freaks out every time dependencies get moved around (which seems like such an easy issue for Unity to fix with an update?). Luckily, I was able to recover some of the scene today in class.

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04.10.18

So the object mode trial of the middle room using RecapPro failed. It showed a small, random strip of wall above one of the whiteboards. I am retrying the compilation in aerial mode and the render should be complete by tomorrow. While the retrial was rendering today, I used 3DMax to smooth out the floor of the gallery mesh. It looks way better, so we do not really need to use blender anymore.

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Weekly Update #48

This week I created a new model of the elab lecture hall using Autodesk RecapPro. The model turned out well; there is minimal distortion and the resolution is beautiful. I used RecapPro's editing tool to further minimize distortion and fill gaps in the mesh. The following day I worked with Dr. Bill to resolve storage issues on the Hydra. We came up with a file system that will reduce storage consumption and use shortcuts to organize materials. I will begin organizing file shortcuts by type next class as my new mesh of the middle room is processing.

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04.06.18

Today Dr. Bill and I dealt with the storage issues on the Hydra. The plan now is to store any new data flatly to the folder called desktop (without directories being nested inside of each other) in 3tb_drive_a and to create shortcuts to frequently-used materials on the desktop itself. The shortcuts can be organized by type (with categories like [.Blend], [.obj], [.fbx], etc. and subcategories like [.Blend] > [middle-room]) so that data is more easily accessible. Once 3tb_drive_a is full, data is to be stored on 3tb_drive_b.

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04.05.18

Shown below are images of the render that was completed today. The model is high quality, but it only shows the hallway area of the elab. I worked out some of the distortions today using the program's built-in shaping tool. I hope to keep working on it next class.




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04.02.18

Today Pikoi and I tested out RecapPro. We uploaded a bunch of sample photos of the northwestern corner of the Elab Lecture Hall (the ones he had taken earlier). The Hydra spent most of the time processing them after that. The render will be complete tomorrow, so I will have updates next class.

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Weekly update #47

This week my primary focus was Autodesk – narrowly, the program 3DMax. It is a good replacement for Blender, which is just too time consuming to learn how to use (I always get the commands mixed up with with Unity ones, anyway). I made progress on the monlab model, but I think I might scrap that and start again with a model with more potential, like the gallery or the APES classroom. Next week I also plan to test out RecapPro, which is a photogrammetry tool from Autodesk.
I will download it on Monday.

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