Category: Uncategorized

It makes me sad to think that this will be my last blog post of the Summer with DTSF. This whole experience was amazing for me and I learned a lot about VR and self learning. I hope to take both of these skills and apply them in the future. There is a lot of potential with Blender and Unity. It was very fulfilling to help recreate the 17th century Spanish theater and I would love to pursue more projects like that one. I also got to learn a lot about the college history during the civil war and it was fun virtually restoring the past iterations of Penn Hall. I am pretty confident that I can create anything in Blender at this point. The only problem is being able to create an item with a low enough polygon count that doesn’t crash the computer.

Outside of VR, DTSF was able to immerse me in a whole plethora of new technology that I didn’t even know existed before this internship. Stuff like 3D printing, Arduino, Raspberry Pi, and photogrammetry all seem very fun to learn and I am open to looking into them for future self-guided projects during the semester.

Overall I wasnt able to accomplish my original task this summer but that doesn’t mean this summer was a waste. It was quite the opposite in fact. When I first arrived in week 1 I was looking for the best way to persue my project. I was split between photogrammetry and 3D modeling. Both are compatible with Unity and VR and photogrammetry is much faster in making models so it was very hard to not go with photogrammetry. With a drone I would most likely be able to put together a model of the entire campus within a week or so and spend the rest of time adding cool VR interactions. Going this route would allow for a lot more time in Unity as well.

After the second week, there were three reasons why I decided to go with the more tedious route and why you should too. The first reason was the distortions close up. Photogrammetry models always looked good from a distance but up close they usually became blurry and distorted where the photographs were lacking. This would be especially visible in VR when the user is at a ground level height looking up at a model that is filled with blurry colors and distortions. While this may be useful in some kind of background setting, it would look very sloppy to use these models in your main scene. The second reason was the 2017 DTSF class already had 2 photogrammetry developers. Part of the program is to be useful to the college as a resource if needed, and my project would have been very similar to Ryan Gonzalez if I went the photogrammetry route, especially because he already modeled most of the large areas of campus. The final reason was the skill set I wanted to develop. Coming out of the summer I wanted to have the ability to create any virtual space I can dream of, something that is not possible with models based on things you take photos of.

While there were a lot of good reasons to go with 3D modeling, there were also setbacks that made me hesitant. I knew the 3D modeling route would be much slower and harder to learn. I basically had to go through a couple weeks of art school to get some of the necessary artistic abilities required for the 3D modeling platform. Also the modeling process is worlds slower than photogrammetry. In 3D modeling one has to model a virtual building with their bare hands. While this may seem simple at first, the more time you spend on the building the more details you realize have to get added, and it becomes a never ending cycle until you realize there is an infinite amount of detail one can add while modeling. Due to these setbacks, I decided to focus on Penn Hall; the cornerstone of Gettysburg College. Since Penn Hall use to be the only building at the college when it was founded I am technically still fulfilling my project of modeling all of campus (hehe).

My newer modified version of the project was now going to be focusing on making Penn Hall as visually accurate as possible as well as creating past models of the building to give a perspective on what Penn hall use to look like over a century ago in VR. While this may seem like a huge downsizing of my project, it was the right way to go. Little did I know my decision would heavily pay off when we went to go to the Hamilton conference. I showed up there with a lot of confidence and I also met several students and mentors who are also using the Blender and Unity combo. This was very reassuring and made me feel like I wasn’t learning a useless skill. Greg was the leader of the conference and had been using Blender for 15 years. He taught me a lot and was very helpful with our project. Even though we didn’t finish the theater, we got a lot more done than expected and it was a lot of fun to make. I hope that I will be able to continue reconstruction of the theater when the semester starts.

The last week was just two days. One was spent practicing our presentations and the other was spent presenting. Overall I felt like all of the presentations went really well. The crowd seemed very engaged in each of our talks and I got a lot of good experience with public speaking as I’m sure the rest of the DTSF team did. This was a great opportunity for me and it inspired me to try some exiting projects of my own during the fall semester. Wish me luck!

Signing out,

~Orrin Wilson

This week the DTSF team packed up and headed to Hamilton College for the DHI Conference. It was a Digital Technology Conference. Three schools attended the conference: Gettysburg, Hamilton, and Colgate. We brought the most modeling students out of the other schools. Hamilton was more interested in Unity and Colgate was using 3DSMax, an architectural program, to create their projects. The leaders of the Conference were both experts in Unity and Blender. It was a very inspiring experience to be able to learn from them and I hope to be able to use them as a resource for further questions I have in the future.

As far as the project Hoang and I were assigned, our goal was to recreate a Spanish theater from 17th century Madrid. This project was a very amazing experience and I learned a lot from it looking back. It taught me a lot about team collaboration and project workflow. The most important lesson I got from this was that things don’t always go to plan.

The first step was to figure out how we were going to split up the work. Both Hoang and I have spent a lot of time on Blender but neither of us have collaborated with another person on the same blender project. So we decided to split the theater into two sections. I worked on the front stage and side seating while Hoang worked on the back part of the theater where the people entered from. Both parts were complex in their own way. The theater has so many different levels and areas of seating at some points it was confusing. For me the backstage area was the most complex part for me because I never worked on an interior section of a model that is also attached to the exterior. When I designed the interior for Penn Hall, I created the interior separate from the exterior in a different Blender file. However while I was designing the backstage it was less intimidating that I originally thought. Hoang also had a difficult task. My section of the project was mostly symmetrical. This allowed me to use the mirror tool in Blender which meant I essentially only had to model half of the front which made things simpler. Hoang, however, was not able to use this because the entrance building is not symmetrical enough to get away with this tool.

After each of our base models were done, we began to go back and add more detail to the model. This included things such as benches, bleachers, banisters, etc. Once the specific model was made for each detailed furniture item, we then had to use the historical information Chris from the Spanish department found regarding how much furniture there was and where it was placed. Getting measurements to be as exact as possible was the most important part of this project. Especially because Hoang and I had to eventually combine our projects. This meant all of our measurements had to remain consistent between the two projects.

After the first day I quickly realized that the work was going to be much more than can be done in a week. So Hoang and I started to work nights in order to stay on schedule. However, even with this extra time, we still weren’t able to finish within the week. We were able to finish the majority of the Blender model excluding the textures.

Going forward we still need to properly transfer the Blender model to Unity along with the textures. There are also things in the model that need to be improved. There are also aspects to add in the future such as a realistic play interacting on the stage.

This was our last full week to work on our projects. Next week we are off to Hamilton College to work on the virtual reconstruction of a Spanish Theater. I am very exited to test what I’ve learned to see what I can do to help others. To be honest this week was pretty stressful for me because I really wanted to finish my project this week so I can relax going to Hamilton and only focus on the presentation on Week 8. I worked around 10 hours a day this week. I am happy to report that my project is almost done. I am 99% finished with my Modern Penn Hall scene and my 1832 Penn Hall scene is almost done as well. All that is left is to do some touch up work and possibly add some historical information the user could read. I am confident I can finish this during my free time at Hamilton or right when we return. I hope to learn a lot from Hamilton. Because the conference is mainly focused on what I have been working on this whole summer, I am looking forward to talking to experts on the topic to learn more about Unity development. After this internship I hope to be able to take what I’ve learned and try to develop something fun and useful in VR.

Getting into more specifics as to what I’ve accomplished this week, I started off the week completing the final edits of penn hall and getting it ready to export to Unity. I made this process very tedious and inefficient. If I did it again it would only take half of the time. Every time I wanted to make an edit, it would change the texture map, so I would have to go back and re-wrap the texture to the model. Right once
I got everything wrapped up, I found another flaw with the model, that could only be seen up close in the Vive. This meant I had to go back into blender and do everything all over again. It was probably the most agonizing part of my project. Next time I won’t even bother wrapping the model until I approve of everything with a Vive walk through.

One of my debates was how to create a border for my project. Because I was only modeling a 50 meter radius around Penn Hall, the terrain just went into nothingness and it made the scene look very empty. I decided to look into creating a water border. It looks very beautiful and it doesn’t distract from the main scene. To add a feel of land going into the distance, I added a ring of trees on the other side of the water.

I am happy with how the scene turned out. I plan on showing this scene to my peers to see if there is anything I missed. I am open to criticism and improvement. It is far from perfect compared to a professional development company, but for a Undergrad Project I think it is a good way of combining all the skills I learned in the past 6 weeks.