Week 9

Week 9-

I have done two more developments in Unreal Engine, the painting canvas and the main menu. I have been working faster as I will be leaving the UK in a month and do not want to be working when I am holiday. Last year I thought I could do coursework during my holiday but it was a struggle because there were too many distractions and in the end I had to do the majority of it last minute when I came back to Portsmouth.

I followed the following tutorial for the painting canvas:

I am very happy with the end result of this as I did not experience any major struggles even though I thought that this would be the most challenging development. Something that I would have liked to include would have been an eraser or a way to reset the canvas. If I have time once I have finished everything else then I will go back to try to design this.

Main Menu:

I did not expect designing the main menu to be difficult and it was   relatively simple in theory, however I was faced with some challenges that ended up taking a lot of my time. 

In virtual reality, users need to see a line coming out of the controller so that they are able to point at the button that they want to press. Without this line the user is unable to select a button and would therefore need an alternative way to use the buttons. I was having an issue where I could not find the "spline tangent" that was used in the video tutorial. I tried to make my own in Maya however this did not yield results either as the line would be too thick each time. In the end I chose a pillar model that was included in the template to function purely as a placeholder. The only other solution I could think of was using the button design that I made before and combining the widget so that the user would be able to physically press the button that they want to select. The main reason that I did not try to implement this is due to the time constraints that I was facing.

I was unable to use the "on pressed" node that would allow me to use the triggers on the motion controller to select "main menu" or "exit". I was unable to understand why this was the case and spent around two days attempting to make it work. By this point I was fed up  of the buttons not working so I took a break and moved on to doing coursework for a different subject.