Technologist, VR Expert, Comedian
Nothing major to report today just–
Oh wait! Breaking now! The VR-MRT, after many (many, many) hoops now has an open source repository available!
It was a whole lot of work to have this available openly and represents perhaps my largest personal project, I had written over 1.2 million lines of code as one of the lead developers.
Without further ado, you can find the repo here: https://github.com/CDCgov/vr-mine-rescue-training
I also have it referenced on my personal github repository.
So after learning about making new UI blueprints I went off and stared a new project. This time, I loaded up Revit to bring in an existing drawing into Unreal to have a more interactive time seeing the drawing. Good times! It almost goes without saying, quick and easy global illumination feels like a cheat code for making nice looking scenes.
A holiday and a few days in and I’m making some good progress. Having the strong existing background in Unity is both a help and a hindrance here. I find myself longing to just write up a character spawner one moment followed by liking the ease of making pretty looking scenes…err…maps.
I will say that the existence of the Quixel/Fab plugin built-in is fascinating. Being able to prototype things extremely quickly is a great tool for me. For the time being, more playing and more exploring. Making associations between what I’ve used a bunch in Unity vs how it gets similarly used in Unreal. The shader graphs! Oh man the shader graphs!
I’m looking forward to getting some solid time in to get my hands on the UI system.
Looking into the current state of things, I’m embarking on a developer side quest…I’m gonna load up the Unreal Engine for the first time in years and get to making a game.
So, here is Day 1, I’ve got the latest version of Unreal installed and I’m gonna embark on getting a project set up.
TIME PASSES
And we’re back. Already ran into a stupid stumbling block before I even began. Windows 11. Yay. It mostly just took some extra time to get the VS tools set up. But hey we have an Actor, we have light, we have a camera, and if I hit play there’s action. In the meantime it’s time to read up on how Unreal plays with C++ and the how their blueprint system works. Normally I’m wary of visual programming languages, one of my first jobs was “writing” code in Labview. Good times.
If this was a road trip, this would be like stopping at the first gas station. We’re still at our starting location, but you’re filling up the car and getting snacks ready for the trip ahead.
I’ve got two shows coming up this May with Select Start!
First, I’ll be performing at the Happy Valley XL Improv Festival on May 15th! Our slot for the festival is at 8PM, so come on over to the Blue Brick Theater in State College, PA to check us out.
The second show I have is the Select Start monthly show at the Arcade Comedy Theater. It’s on Friday May 30th at 9PM at the Arcade Comedy Theater in Pittsburgh, PA. This month we’re doing a Mr. Rogers themed show. So be neighborly and come check us out!
Welcome to my little corner of the internet. In the coming days and weeks I’ll be posting information up here about new projects and performances I have in the docket. Right now though? I’ll be over here placing all these ducks in a row.
Bren Macdonald 