It's already March!

Hi! Geril here.

Working on a new project has its ups and downs. On the one hand, fresh new ideas and goals, and on the other hand, doing things that we already did many times.

But this time we got something new. We can't say much about the project - NDA and all -, but we are now gaining experience with working with motion capture. Because of this, we were forced to learn how to use Post Process Animation Blueprints in Unreal 4, and man, we should have learnt this years ago, it makes helper-bone handling a non-issue. We used Unreal's Metahuman as the basis, so we learnt how to do it by mimicking its methods, adjusting them to our needs and changing them to fit our custom skeleton.

I really want to show off things, but we can't.

On a different note, after the massive burnout and nightmares, Lussy is finally getting back to her usual creative mode, working on a 3D model she wanted to make for months now.

Oh, and we modded a Nintendo DS Lite to output an RCA signal. We're using it with our projector, so it looks pretty nice. This pushed Lussy to finally finish Castlevania: Order of Ecclesia and play Okamiden. One day I want to print a new case for the modded DS, but our 3D printer is acting up, so I'll just have to do it later.

Also, we needed an Xbox Series controller so we wanted to buy one. I asked Lussy to choose one, but she didn't like any of the controllers for sale so we ordered a custom one - Lussy designed the controller to her liking. It has our company's name on it, so it's officially ours. The extra features are nice and all but what I really like about it is its battery life.

2023!

We got through probably the hardest year of our lives so far.

Many things happened that made our lives difficult; we're moving soon and we're working on a different project now.

We're also dipping our toes into motion capture – full body, not just facial capture. So working on personal projects became somewhat hard, we rarely have time do it (again – or rather, still).

What Geril is messing around with nowadays is the iPhone app RealityScan, that creates photogrammetry in semi-real time. You basically have to take several photos of your target from all angles, and as you're taking the pictures, you can see the app building the 3D asset in AR. It can use up to 200 pictures – that you have to take inside the app –, and it uploads those to its cloud server. Making a preview can take some time, and you can only export the result into Sketchfab.

We used to upload some of our projects to Sketchfab, so we're familiar with the platform (for whatever reason, we have 4.7k followers). After the Sketchfab export, it's fairly easy to download the mesh and the two textures.

I shot a few (hundred) photos at our family Christmas, so I can share my grandmother's Christmas cookies with everybody. There's also a wooden hawk and a wall that is in a very bad shape.

We hope that we can show you something interesting this year, that we can be more active. Also, we hope that you all had happy holidays and will have a happy New Year!

Still Alive!

Sorry for the long silence. This year so far has just been too stressful to do anything but work. And because work created most of the stress and drama in our lives, it kinda fed off itself, overwhelming us to the point where we couldn't take it anymore.

So after three years, we're leaving the project we've been working on.

There were specific things that prompted the actual resignation (or more like, the last straws that broke the camel's back), but even if we end up writing about them, it won't be now, only some time in the future. We're not sure we want to even talk about the project we were on - and that makes assembling our portfolio quite hard.

Anyway, now that we're done, we can do things that we actually want to do, like improve our development skills, make our own little projects, spend time on hobbies or just in general, be less stressed.

We have several opportunities, we'll see what we want to do with our lives, but one thing is for sure, we'll need a bit of chill after this whole mess.

Also, we wrote a few posts in the last eight months that we never released, mostly because we were too tired and overworked to think about the blog. Here's some of those, just to log what happened with us in 2022 so far:

March:

We rarely talk about our actual work nowadays, but there's something that we really want to share: we've been working with iPhone's Live Link Face app, based on the Apple ARKit. Connected with Unreal 4, it allows us to use real time facial capture. It works well out of the box, but to make it work the way we wanted it to, Lussy had to adjust many things, and create logic that mimics missing features and makes everything move smoother.

One of the issues with this tech is that it can not separate the two eyebrows' movements. We worked around this by using slow-moving eyebrow blendspaces fed by the eyes' lookat position. Also, shoulder movement was added to the head movements. Honestly, what really sells the method is the simulated physics on the hair.

We'd really like to show you what we did, but we can't.

June:

This month, we got our hands on a Steam Deck.

Nice little machine, and it's a weird experience after the GPD Win 2. The most interesting thing about it is its operating system. Steam OS is a custom Linux that acts like Windows, making independent Windows-like directory systems for each software.

Control-wise it's quite agile, I (Geril) can customise it any way I want, and because we already have a Steam Controller, we know what to expect from its touch pads, and already got used to its quirks.

As somebody who played WoW a lot on the GPD Win 1 and 2, I found the Deck's options a big jump forward. There's many ways to adjust and optimize the controls, it is even possible to add scrolling menus and context sensitive values to change the controls' attributes.

We've played WoW, Hatsune Miku, Fallout 4 and a bunch of indie titles. We've even used Discord while playing WoW, and it worked just fine.

The next step is to figure out if we can use Unreal Editor on the Deck. It's not easy to set up a launcher on it, desktop mode has to be used to add the software to Steam as a Non-Steam title.

Lussy is exploring the hardware's latency with rhythm games, and on its own it works fine, but on the TV or with a controller, there is some noticeable latency.

Maybe the official dock will solve the issue, we'll see.

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Anyway, in the coming months, look forward to a lot more content.

PIU VR!

Merry holidays and such!

Geril here.

This year was... a lot. Didn't have time for personal projects or anything. Well, at least at the end of the year we had a bit of time to just do whatever, so we're trying to achieve Lussy's ultimate goal: getting a Pump it Up arcade system in our household.

Sadly, we don't have the space or the money for an actual PIU arcade cabinet, so we went for the next best thing: emulation. But not just plain old emulation with keyboard or basic flimsy dance-pad inputs, no. We're going VR.

Well, for the inputs at least, we're not sure about the headset. We may not need that.

So in our time over the holidays, we grabbed one of Lussy's old boots, and attached the Vive controller to it. The position recognition was fine after we figured out the right way to attach the Vive controllers. What Lussy didn't like was that the moment for the actual contact with the floor was imprecise.

Because of that, the next step was to attach pressure sensors to the boots. After some cutting, wiring and duct taping, Lussy found the right positioning for the sensors, and the VR boots 0.7 was born!

We did the whole thing in Unreal 4 – because of course we did –, and used a control rig to make a basic mannequin character mimic the foot and leg movements. It was pretty hard to figure out the right rotation values, but in the end Lussy made it work with the tech we made.

I made a basic dancepad mesh and we reused some of our old assets from our older rhythm game prototype, so we actually have some visuals. Nothing fancy, but it helps us understand what's going on. Can't wait to work on it more.

In January we'll probably have no time to work on it. The start of the year is never easy and now that we have a company it's getting nightmarish. But we'll see.

November!

Hi! Geril here.

November can be a messy month, we have a lot of birthdays in our family.

Our experience with the Famicom Disk system (Twin Famicom) grew, as we expand our libary of games to it. It's a bit slow — which is something we're not used to from a classic Nintendo system — but it loads. At least usually. Other times we get something like this:

 

We like to play Guitar Hero with my sister when she comes over. We have two Guitar Hero guitar controllers and a mic, but sadly we just can't find a drumset.

Just a week ago we checked out Rockband. Back when Guitar Hero was the hot game — more than ten years ago — I was aware of Rockband, but never played it, because I had no Xbox360 or PS3, so I just played Guitar Hero on my PC. Later Lussy and I got Guitar Hero 3 for the Xbox360 and slowly bought all of the games from the series, and also a second, wireless guitar. We played a lot with my sister, too, but after we played all of the songs we like — and we can't buy new ones —, we started to get bored of it. Good thing that we realized that we can play Rockband with the same controllers!

Now we're playing the Rockband games that got released on the X360, buying them one by one.

We thought about playing the latest Rockband game — the fourth one — on the Xbox One, but because we can't connect our controllers, we can't.

I had an idea. I connected my Windows PC to my Xbox One with remote play (via the Xbox Companion app), and connected my X360 guitar to my PC, so that I could control it from there.

Sadly it didn’t quite work. I could navigate the menus, but the Xbox One acted like it was a regular Xbox controller, not a guitar. Too bad.

Burnout.

Hey! Geril here.

Well, these few months were quite a struggle to get through.

We crunched, and burned out like dried leaf set on fire. The project we're working on got an update and we've had to work a lot on it to get it to the finish line. We got a little bit of a break afterwards so we've been sorting out all the stuff we put away because of work. One of these things were the blogposts.

So what happened with us outside of work? Not much. Really, we concentrated on work so much we didn't have time for other things. 

In the last week, I learnt photogrammetry, what is basically a bunch of photos of an object taken from different angles and pulled through a photogrammetry software - I used Meshroom. Of course it's not that easy, because the result is noisy, super high-res and at a weird angle, but I can just fix those issues in Blender and bake the hi-res mesh onto a relatively low-res mesh.

After a few tries I realized that this works best with food and natural shapes, not with precise geometrical ones, so I mostly just made food-scans, removed the plate or bowl and baked the rest to a lower res version of the photogrammetry mesh, then put it back on a plate or bowl. (he is basically photographing everything before eating, and he takes a LOT more photos than your average Instagram food blogger - Lussy)

It's fun, I also baked a normal map and a few support masks – roughness and AO – so it looks pretty nice in my opinion. For optimization reasons I also made several LOD levels for the mesh, too.

Right now it doesn't have a purpose, or any plans with it, I just wanted to learn how to do it.

Also, Lussy gave me my birthday gift early this year, I got a Twin Famicom from her! It's an awesome system, a combo of the Famicom and its Disk System. I love it.

We also have a Metroid disk for it, and it runs much smoother than the PAL NES version we also have. So we're collecting Famicom and Famicom Disk games now. It's getting really hard to find a good way to store our games. We're planning to buy more shelves, but without a car it's hard to get them home.

Oh well. 

We hope that from now on we'll have more free time. We're not sure right now, but maybe.

Oculus Quest 2!

Hi, Geril here.

April is here! It sometimes looks like it's summer, then blam: snow. Oh well, April is the most bipolar month I guess.

We got our hands on an Oculus Quest 2! We already had a Vive Pro, but setting that up is never easy so it's always extra effort just making it work. That usually means we don't use it for fun, only for work. Also, it is too big for Lussy's head, so it gives her headaches when she uses it.

Well, Oculus is the other way around. There's no real setup, you just put it on your head - you may have to set up Guardian or set the bounds to stationary - and there you go, you're in VR. No cables, no pairing and it also doesn't need a PC - it has its own operating system. The controller tracking is inside-out, so it also needs no lighthouses or tracking devices.

Its quality of life features are excellent, too. With Guardian, the headset warns me when I'm too close to the edge of the Guardian space. It keeps in mind where we drew the bounds, and we can add a couch or a table to its calculations, so it understands what's happening.

Connection with a PC is straightforward. You'll need a long, good quality USB 3.1 to USB-C cable, connect it to a PC, download the Oculus app, and there you go.

The controllers are also quite good, especially after the Vive's wands. The wands are really good for precise work - because of the touchpads -, but for gaming, it just doesn't make sense. Oculus at least has analogue sticks, that are standard in gaming.

All good, right? Well, no.

The headache comes from the Quest's operating system. It needs a Facebook account and it keeps notes and information about your location and such. It's super creepy, and I really don't like it. I'm sure they can't do much with my info, but still, Facebook's way of stalking freaks me out.

Other than feeling the cold stare of the big brother, the inside-out tracking is just not as precise as the lighthouse method. It's still absolutely playable, but as someone who's using VR for work too, precision is the most important feature of a controller.

You can't buy games inside the Oculus, you must install a smartphone app and link it with the headset. This is kind of a headache, because I have to jump between devices just to buy something.

What is also disappointing is that the Oculus doesn't work in daylight. We have an unnecessarily huge balcony, with nothing on it, and I thought I could use the empty space for room-scale VR play. Nope. Oculus doesn't like UV light, and bright lights in general, they confuse it. I waited until dusk, and set up the guardian on the balcony. At dusk, it works fine, a bit weird sometimes, but manageable. I played and finished SUPERHOT VR, but by the end of it, it was dark and the Oculus stopped working again. It didn't like the darkness.

So yeah, it's an indoors-toy. Oh well.

Now, what gave me the most headaches is the wireless connection. It needed an app called VR Desktop that really didn't like our router settings. Early this month, we bought a new shiny Archer AX11000 router that is a beast, but sadly, VR Desktop just didn't like it. After a few days of trying, Lussy could finally connect through it, but I just couldn't. I turned on my PC's WiFi hotspot, that basically connected my PC straight to the headset, and that worked, but it had very short range.

But good news, they just released a beta feature that gives us an official way to connect to a PC in the latest patch! And it works without any struggle. FINALLY!

So in our experience, the Oculus Quest 2 is a good headset overall. I'd rather not give away my personal information and location, and I'll probably keep using the Vive when it comes to game development - its precision is superior - but for fun, and for showing someone what VR gaming is, the Quest 2 is the easier hardware to show off. It's also cheaper, which is surprising.