A big part of the Skylines: City Generator project was being able to render hundreds of different cyberpunk and futuristic building models in realtime in TouchDesigner. Since I had made the early decision to purchase asset packs for the buildings and use Blender to clean and prepare them before I imported them into TouchDesigner, I needed to come up with a way to optimise the asset loading process on project startup to be able to monitor the process and avoid any unnecessary crashes and also to allow for easy loading of modified or new assets.

Read more

In the last post, I discussed how the need for optimization arose while I was working on the Skylines: City Generator project and how I approached coming up with a solution to solve this problem. In this post, I will take a deep dive into the optimization network and talk about the different pieces that helped me improve the performance of the project.

Read more

In the last post, I discussed the creation of a point allocation algorithm to assign points on a grid for instancing multiple different building models of different sizes for the Skylines: City Generator project. In this post, we will discuss the new problems that I discovered when I was able to instance 100’s of different buildings and how I went about solving these problems.

Read more

In this first part, I will dive into the simple set of rules that I chose to help generate the city. I was inspired by the clean grid based layouts that you can see in parts of Manhattan with the style and aesthetics of a city straight from the dystopian future, where the roads are evenly spaced and the buildings are tightly packed together like Lego blocks.

Read more

The goal of the project was to create an interesting streaming experience where instead of following a single players stream, the viewer is able to watch the entire party playing the game live and can easily catch all the interesting moments without having to change streams.

Read more

TouchDesigner and OBS are excellent tools for virtual production and streaming content. I am here to present an alternative to the current workflow of using NDI to share video streams between the two. We will be using Spout to share real-time video textures between TouchDesigner and OBS.

Read more

Evolve brought together artists, designers, thinkers, makers, writers, and more to help museums foster excitement for natural history topics. Partnering with the Cleveland Museum of Natural History, Evolve created a puzzle-based, narrative-driven experiences for the 21 through 35-year-old demographic. Building off the concept of an escape room, Evolve sought to redefine interactive storytelling in a physical location, combining the best of location-based gaming and immersive theater during the Spring 2019 semester.

Read more

During this Spring 2019 semester at the CMU ETC, I took Ruth Comely's Experience Design class that gave us an introduction of working in the interactive and immersive industry. We worked in teams to create small experiences from lighting design and projection mapping experiences to a CAVE experience and working with Phidget sensors to create interactive experiences. In this post I have summarized a few of the experiences we created this semester.

Read more

Miracle Workshop 2.0 was a collaborative project with Give Kids The World Village during this past Fall 2018 semester, a nonprofit resort in Central Florida that provides cost-free vacations to children with life-threatening illnesses and their families. We retrofitted Tom Foolery, an existing puppet at GKTW, into a five-function audio animatronic figure that their volunteers and staff will be able to control safely from a remote location, rather than their current crawl space. The staff need to run the animatronic in real time and control its interactions with a live actor or existing animatronic in the space.

Read more

I remember there being a time while growing up, where every other game was basically a local multiplayer game where you could play alongside your friends in the same room. I really long for days where I would sit in front of the TV and play the same game for hour on end with my friends. This got me thinking about why is that fewer and fewer companies are building local multiplayer games.

Read more