Towards a formal education of visual effects artists

The rapid growth of the visual effects industry over the past three decades and increasing demand for high quality visual effects for film, television and similar media, in turn increasing demand for graduates in this field have highlighted the need for formal education in visual effects. In this paper, we explore the design of a visual effects undergraduate degree programme and discuss our aims and objectives in implementing this programme in terms of both curriculum and syllabus

Project SAGA: Towards Bridging the Gap between Serious and Entertainment Games

We present the “SAGA” project, a concept for an entertainment game that is currently in development, which is based on historical and archaeological research and set in the mythology of the Vo˛luspá. SAGA bridges the gap between Serious and Entertainment games by neither forsaking history and facts for entertainment, nor compromising on playability for historical accuracy. Reusing development work from the archaeological visualisation of a real world location on the island of Orust in Sweden, and transposing historical elements from other Viking age sites into the world of the game, the aim of SAGA is to convey the intangible heritage and history of Viking age society and beliefs to the game’s players. In this paper we describe the game concept, discuss its development from an archaeological visualisation for use in a museum context and provide an outlook on the next steps in the game’s developmen

Traditional Romanian Egg Decoration in Augmented Reality with 3D Printing

The folk art of decorating Easter eggs is an important part of Romania’s intangible cultural heritage. We have developed a prototype for a mobile Augmented Reality (AR) app that allows users to virtually decorate Easter eggs, using a 3D printed egg as a physical AR marker to allow tangible interaction with the egg, mimicking the decorating process

Developing serious games for cultural heritage: a state-of-the-art review

Although the widespread use of gaming for leisure purposes has been well documented, the use of games to support cultural heritage purposes, such as historical teaching and learning, or for enhancing museum visits, has been less well considered. The state-of-the-art in serious game technology is identical to that of the state-of-the-art in entertainment games technology. As a result, the field of serious heritage games concerns itself with recent advances in computer games, real-time computer graphics, virtual and augmented reality and artificial intelligence. On the other hand, the main strengths of serious gaming applications may be generalised as being in the areas of communication, visual expression of information, collaboration mechanisms, interactivity and entertainment. In this report, we will focus on the state-of-the-art with respect to the theories, methods and technologies used in serious heritage games. We provide an overview of existing literature of relevance to the domain, discuss the strengths and weaknesses of the described methods and point out unsolved problems and challenges. In addition, several case studies illustrating the application of methods and technologies used in cultural heritage are presented

Off-Line Evolution of Behaviour for Autonomous . . .

This paper describes and analyses a series of experiments intended to evolve a player for a variation of the classic arcade game Asteroids^TM using steady state genetic programming. The player's behaviour is defined using a LISP like scripting language. While the game interprets scripts in real-time, such scripts are evolved off-line by a second program which simulates the realtime application. This method is used, as on-line evolution of the players would be too time consuming. A successful player needs to satisfy multiple conflicting objectives. This problem is addressed by the use of an automatically defined function (ADF) for each of these objectives in combination with task specific fitness functions. The overall fitness of evolved scripts is evaluated by a conventional fitness function. In addition to that, each of the ADFs is evaluated with a separate fitness function, tailored specifically to the objective that needs to be satisfied by that ADF

Digital Matte Painting - An Effective Undergraduate Assignment

This paper presents an effective digital matte painting assignment from a course delivered as part of an undergraduate degree programme in visual effects. The assignment involves the creation of a final 3D shot from an initial 2D image, using various 2D image manipulation tools and appropriate 2.5D image projection techniques