Category: Blog

Sjoerd De Jong has been here for the past five days and taught our second year game students everything about the Unreal Development Kit. Sjoerd has been working with the Unreal Engine since 1999. He’s been involved in the development of five commercial Unreal Engine titles, has authored two books, released a training video and runs the worlds largest Unreal Engine 3 tutorials website! Add to this his five very large non-profit projects and more than 30 award winning Unreal levels and Sjoerd “Hourences” De Jong can safely claim to be an expert level designer and environment artist!

Teachers Teaching Teachers has sprung from some of the ancient social habits of the GAME-staff. For as long as anyone care to remember we’ve had this tradition where we get together every now and then, on weekends or lecture free days, to talk about whatever we know and anyone was interested to hear. It’s been an informal way to share our expertise with each other.

… or perhaps more like a bunch of teachers hanging out and showing off. 🙂

Over the years we’ve taught each other game design, programming, various software tools, talked about modern game research etc etc. All interresting stuff and over time these informal workshops and presentations have turned into a seriously important way for all of us to keep up-to-date and gain new insights.

Today this ancient habit of ours is made public and opened to a wider audience. We call it Teachers Teaching Teachers and from now on we invite all staff at the university to join in!

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The theory of motion capture is quite simple: an actor puts on a full body suit with reflective markers on all limbs. Several cameras in the room track these markers and relay their coordinates to a computer, yielding a perfecly accurate digital representation of the actors movement. This representation – a “bone rig” – is then dressed up in 3D-application software like 3D Studio Max, Motion Builder to make the actor look like whatever we want. This is a huge time saver and yields significantly more realistic motions than animation done by hand.

GAME’s motion capture studio covers 35m² and is theoretically capable of tracking any number of actors and props simultaneously! Here’s some photos from when Andreas Wahlman (our in-house mocap expert) first tried out multi-capping in our studio. First year students Ragnar, Jonas and Stina volunteered to assist with the swinging of swords, throwing punches and pushing each other off high cliffs. 🙂