Augmented reality is a rapidly growing trend in the gaming / graphics industry and I love seeing people push the limits of the technology. I’ve posted once or twice before about some basic prototypes that are out there, but this is really cool.

ARhrrr is a prototype game from the Georgia Tech Augmented Environments Lab and the Savannah College of Art and Design. The game requires a hand held device equipped with a new graphics processing unit called the Nvidia Tegra and a tabletop map.

Once you start the game, the buildings pop up on the screen and zombies start to flood out of them into the streets, terrorizing innocent civilians that you need to rescue. You point the camera on the device towards the zombies using the on-screen crosshair and tap anywhere on the screen to shoot. The game incorporates the use of real-world objects, skittles in this case, as game elements such as bombs.

I love seeing the AR games, but what I find the most interesting is what’s coming in the future. Augmenting reality to the point where we see a Tom Tom arrow through our contact lenses while we’re hiking in the woods, or being able to look at a building and get the contact information for the businesses inside based on GPS location. Yeah, it’s going to be real sweet.

Today marks the end of my winter term, and the completion of my 2 minute previsualization final project. I busted this out in a grueling 48 hours of work, 40 of which I was awake straight. It’s a little rough here and there but overall I am pretty happy with it.

Things to revisit would be shadows fo’ sho, the flickering kills me. I couldn’t afford the render time to use raytraced shadows so I stuck with depthmap shadows. If I ever get around to it, I would love to add depth of field to the shots and include some sort of environmental fog. On this project I learned alot about Maya’s particle systems and really enjoyed creating the smoke trails. In a couple shots the particles are pretty rough due to some restrictions I was running into with ramp input nodes.

After the aerial dog fights it starts to fall apart a bit… When I was working on the tank/village shots I was starting to cut corners due to exhaustion and the need to meet a deadline. The most blaring issues I have with the final shots are the inconsistent lighting and the physically impossible motion paths for the planes. The 2nd to last shot of the spitfires peeling up after strafing the german column of tanks all I can thing of is this classic Star Wars quote, “Break off the attack! The shield is still up!“.

Anyways, I really just wanted to share this, I am relieved to be done with this term. I hope y’all enjoy.

This is a solo previs project I am working. Check out the animatic, composited from a bunch of scanned index cards I drew up. In a couple of weeks this will be a full 3D production.

Hey guys,

I completed my first big assignment at SCAD this week, thought I would share the results with you all.  I modeled and textured a Spitfire Mark II B, a british war plane from WWII.  Hope you like it, I busted my ass on this one.

-Kyle