Author Archives: Kris Howald

Initially, the landscape was described to be more of an approximation. However, as the project progressed it became clear that the accuracy needed to be there. Finding topological maps of the area of Stowe Ville was somewhat of a challenge, to begin with I thought I could try to use historical aerial maps, but thoseContinue reading “Environment”

I’m a bit behind on my posts due to the start of my school year. So prepare for a massive release of posts from the past month and a half. This first post highlights some experimentation I was doing with cards to populate the forests. Because they’re only 2D, they are to be used fromContinue reading “Vegitation”

The other day I went through the process of modelling an axe with our CG modelling team. The model was based on existing references assembled by the research team. I did have a few initial questions on how the axe head connected to the handle. Was it fastened to a wedge-shaped end, or was itContinue reading “The Axe Effect”

Today I hunkered down and started to learn SpeedTree for unreal (https://store.speedtree.com/ue4/). Foliage will play a crucial compositional role in the new version. There is a lot of work ahead to get the look working aesthetically. I ran through building a tree from scratch, testing its lightmaps, and then bringing it into Unreal. For theContinue reading “Tree”

There were three things that I decided to work on today. Begin to investigate approaches for procedurally generating components for the longhouse. Continue to develop the painterly look inside substance painter. Develop the beginnings of our research book shared amongst the various teams working on this project. For the procedural aspect of this project, itContinue reading “Procedural longhouse and other thoughts…”

Now that we’ve discussed previous versions of the longhouse let’s look at where we’re at and how we’re going to move forward. This new version of the longhouse is being led by Namir Ahmed from Ryerson University. Longhouse 5.0 will realize all of the aspects that we weren’t able to incorporate into 4.0. With collaborationContinue reading “Where we’re going – Longhouse 5.0”

Welcome to my new metablog. My name is Kris Howald, and I’m a Professor with Sheridan College’s Computer Animation program. I’m not sure how long these posts will be, but I’m going to try to do my best to document the process for developing the new version of the longhouse project. I want to startContinue reading “Where we came from – Longhouse 4.0”