The app is now available on appstores

Project Overview

Discover Huntsville is an app developed during my internship with Trideum. The application serves as a tourist guide, helping users explore the city of Huntsville, Alabama, and connect with local art and businesses.

Overall Contributions

During my internship, I held roles as a 3D Generalist, Technical Artist, and Programmer. My contributions were pivotal in various aspects of the project, including 3D content generation, pipeline optimization, and programming major components of the app.

Technologies Used

The project utilized several technologies, including:

• Unity
• Mapbox
• Maya
• Blender
• Houdini

Background

My selection for this internship was influenced by my role in a previous group project overseen by Trideum. My ability to connect technologies, develop pipelines, and optimize workflows proved instrumental in my success at UVU and as a team member at Trideum.

Specific Contributions

3D Content Generation with Houdini, Maya, and Blender

• Generated 3D content using Houdini and Maya, enriching the app with visually appealing assets.

Plants generated with Houdini for virtual koi pond

Lilly

For this plant I used cable physics to set the stems, UV packing to pack the geometry of the lillypads and some clever vex to connect the cables.

Waterweed

To generate waterweed, I created a top segment, and a midsegment. These were then duplicated along a spline and rotated randomly creating the appearance of the final plant.

Cluster Generator - Uses a TOP network to automate randomizing parameters and saving cached versions out, then picking from that cache to instance to the cluster.

Lotus

This used simple petal generation and deformations with some math to form it into a lotus.

Koi Pond

This was a central feature of one of the AR games. It involved finding a wall with street art of Koi fish and then a Koi pond would appear on the wall and you could design your own fish to put in the pond.

I created the plants as mentioned earler and all the rest of it as well.

The stylized shaders were also a big part of my work here in Unity.

Rocket

I modeled all the rocket pieces in Houdini. That let me make quick changes and iterations and it was easier to add vertex data that I could use in the shader I created in Unity.

Enviornment of Koi pond

I created several system to generate meshes and rocks for the koi pond. This included the creative use of noise, and remeshing to create the walls, and TOP networks to create random copies of objects.

Backdrop rock wall:

Ground:

Rocks:

Scattering the Rocks:

Pipeline Optimization

• Developed efficient pipelines to streamline the development process, ensuring smooth workflows and timely delivery of assets.
• Specifically extending Unity’s packaging system in order to more easily modularise the project and make it easier for the team to work on separate components without conflicts.
• Created design documents that covered code conventions, design, conventions, file structure, and name conventions.

Programming in C#

• Utilized C# programming to build major components of the app, enhancing its functionality and user experience.
• One of my main contributions was working on a custom UI layer that would work more like a conventional mobile app. I learned how to better use some of the more advanced features of C# like generics.
• I also helped to implement the Mapbox Api into unity, which took some considerable reworking for it to work for our use-case.

Shader Development

• Created custom shaders to add visual depth and flair to the app’s 3D experiences.
• This involved code and using a shader-graph in order to create the shaders.
• I learned a great deal about GPU call stacks, and performance.

(Ufortunately I no longer have access to the project and wasn’t able to document visually what work I did here.)

Achievements & Impact

The Discover Huntsville app achieved significant milestones and positively impacted users by providing an immersive and informative experience of the city.