MUV601 - Robin Le Couteur - Assignment 3, blog 2 - 2018


Assignment 3 Initial Progress - Blog 2

Model

This project started with me testing SketchUp model imports. To do this I made a simple terrain feature in SketchUp, then exported it as a COLLADA .dae file.

Here is the model in SketchUp:

While exporting is was important to make sure that the settings were right. The notable ones are 'Export Two-Sided Faces' and 'Triangulate All Faces'. These were not enabled by default and meant that I got weird graphical glitches such as faces not being visible on both sides and additional faces appearing from the original faces not being triangulated.


After importing successfully, this is how it appeared in Second Life:

With confirmation that imports were working properly, I made a keyboard in SketchUp and imported it into Second Life.
I had to make sure that on import, the LOD settings for it were set to be full LOD for any view distance. This is because the keys would distort at a distance and their shape was also the shape of their lowest LOD even when I am viewing them at full LOD.

This is what the keys looked like with low LOD vs the high LOD only model. As you can see the difference is massive.


As you may also notice I designed the keyboard in SketchUp with a small space between each key. As I suspected, the keys are treated as linked objects, so I can script them all separately. This saves me from having to upload each key individually which I thought I may have to do.

Sound

To get the sounds for each key was a bit of a challenge because the samples in Ableton Live don't cover every single note. There are multiple files that cover a range of notes in the Ableton sampler, then the sampler distorts them to each pitch. This meant I somehow had to increase the number of files so I had a file for every singe note. 

After much searching I figured that I record a file in Ableton of me playing a chromatic scale covering the full range of my SL keyboard. I then quantize the notes. Quantizing just makes each note the exact same length and volume. 

My project in Ableton Live:

Since each note is the same length and there are exactly 25 notes, theoretically if I cut this file I made into 25 separate files I would get each note in each file. I managed to find a program called WavePad by NCH, and cut up the file with a tool as shown in the following. 

WavePad:

Result:

I then uploaded the files into Second Life and began the keyboard script prototyping. This is still not complete so I will talk about it next blog. 

See you next blog!





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