Hi! So far, working on my capstone has been a great time! My teammates are great and learning new technology is always fun. Except when it doesn’t work.
For our project, we have to create an AR storybook. Our goal is to improve literacy rate for young kids and having an AR experience on top of words will improve kids to be more engaged. In order to accomplish this, we are using Blender and Unity to build our project.
We have a beautiful model of Peter Rabbit and the cast of characters that are in his book thanks to our great teammate. And now, my job is to add animation to these amazing models. In order to do so, I have been learning Blender. Now, as a computer science student, most of the work is line by line, looking at documentation, walls of code. Blender and Unity has been a completely different experience.
Many of the work done requires dragging, dropping, scrolling, watching Youtube. Learning and familiarizing myself with the software UI has been the challenging part. So many features are included in Blender and Unity and all of those features require spending time to understand what they do. It used to be a function, with inputs and outputs but now, its a checkbox that unpacks a whole new feature that I have to calibrate on a bar gradient.
Despite this unfamiliar world of game design software, I think the core concept is the same as a computer science student. Compared to my past degree of Biology, Computer science requires me to become familiar with a technology. Once I am familiar, it is up to me to leverage this technology with my past understanding of all the other technology have learned. With each new technology learned and applied to my goal, I feel myself taking one more step at becoming a competent software engineer.
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