Departmental Support

VR/Desktop game for Architecture technology class

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The DMC has collaborated on a multi-year project staring in Nov. 2020 to assist professor Juan José Castellón in creating a digital means of experimentation for his students. Professor Castellón’s class includes assignments which require students to physically create form finding models from wood, chain, cloth and other material. The DMC has supported the Architecture assignments by allowing students to create digital versions of these models using a videogame created with Unreal Engine. The game was created using the collab viewer template which is actively used in Architecture firms to collaborate and display architecture visualizations. DMC Supervisor Mario Norton added features into the existing template enable users to quickly create relevant models and explore forms that could be created physically. Several hired student researchers from the Architecture department contributed ideas and feedback and development suggestions.

game screenshot

 

The current game allows students to play the game simultaneously in a Desktop and/or VR environment. Added features include the ability to create hanging chains, height map displaced cloth which can be sliced and configured, simulated “cloth” meshes, add common shapes, rigid body simulations with parenting, and import of 3D geometry from Rhino and other packages.

The game was installed in Rice Architecture’s RAVL lab in July, 2021 and updated in Nov, 2021. Professor Castellón’s students were able to experience the game as a practical component of their course. For more details and blueprint code of this project, please visit https://dmcgraphics.blogs.rice.edu/unreal-engine/collab-viewer-additions/

Hanging chain experiment:

Height map “cloth” experiment:

Draw polygon, extrude and slice:

Rice environment, add geometry, rigid body sim, and multiplayer:

3D printed replacement part

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The Physics and Astronomy department was in need of a very small scale for one of their lab telescopes. The professor reached out to the DMC to have the part modeled and 3D printed. 3D printing can be a suitable alternative when a missing or broken part is hard to obtain.

Below is the 3D model created in Blender:

3D model of scale

 

With the help of Moody Center for the Art’s Makerspace, Robert Purvis printed the piece using a resin printer. Below is the finished piece with graphite brushed into the incised markings:

 

 

Photo/Video Studio as a Resource for Department Headshots

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Student being photographed in a lighting studio

Student portrait with a blue background

As of Summer 2022, the DMC’s Photo/Video Studio has undergone a drastic transformation. We have acquired 6 high output LED lights with large soft boxes and white, black, and dark blue seamless paper backdrops which make the studio ideal for professional quality headshots. Using a simple 3 point lighting setup, the Electrical and Computer Engineering Department took headshots for the incoming graduate students for their department website. The studio can be reserved up to one month in advance just as you would a piece of DMC equipment using the self-booking feature in Primo. Photo/Video Studio Reservation Page

If you have any questions about how to use the equipment in the studio, ask DMC staff or refer to our Photo/Video Studio written guides

Graduate and Postdoctoral Studies Virtual Campus Tour

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With much of the world still shut down due to COVID-19, traveling to tour college campuses has become infeasible for many prospective students. Seeking instead for a way to bring Rice to the student, the office of Graduate and Postdoctoral Studies reached out to the Digital Media Commons to create a virtual tour of campus that offered more immersion than a standard video. The resulting project produced a 360 degree video made up of panoramas of places of interest around campus, which when paired with Google Cardboard headsets allow a prospective student to pan around the scene and take in the sights.

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Ian produced the video by shooting a series of photos of each location, taking multiple passes rotating around a stationary point to create a sphere. Then, those individual photos were organized, aligned, and stitched using Agisoft Metashape, resulting in a 360 degree panoramic output. Finally, the completed panoramas were compiled into a single 360 video using Adobe Premiere Pro, adding in the narration and background music.