Museumfabriek
Source: https://www.demuseumfabriek.nl/content/2365/nl/over-de-museumfabriek
"Enschede Weaving Factory: A Historic VR Experience". The goal is to create a highly immersive VR Experience that will show off what it was like to be in a weaving factory in Enschede, back in 1930.
We have to use Unreal Engine 5 for this. The project was meant to only be for Artists and Designers, not Engineers.
Source: https://www.saxionxrlab.com/imts/
I am an Engineer. This means that there wasn't exactly something planned in beforehand that I could work on. So I had to take it upon myself to think up things to do. As I am interested in potentially becoming an Infrastructure Engineer / Build Engineer in the future, I wanted to use this project as an opportunity to dive really deep into that, by setting up all kinds of infrastructure and automations for my teammates. Of course, I still helped with actual coding here and there. But seeing as there wasn't supposed to be an engineer at all in this project, that wasn't necessary very often.
These are my teammates, their roles, specialities, and portfolios:
| Name | Team Role | Specialties | Portfolio |
|---|---|---|---|
| Carolina Bertoncello Machado | Team Lead, Designer |
Narrative Design, Level Design, Documentation | https://carolina-bertoncello-machado---game-des.webflow.io/ |
| Chris Peters | Artist |
3D Assets, Procedural Art, Unreal Engine | https://www.artstation.com/chrispeters99 |
| Faried Elawady | Team Lead, Artist |
Technical art, Asset creation, Project overview | https://www.artstation.com/premadness |
| Jelle Boelen | Engineer |
Code, Tooling & Infrastructure | https://technicjelle.com/ |
| Julia Calis | Designer |
Research, Storyboarding | https://juliacalis.wixsite.com/home |
| Nataliia Sviridenko | Team Lead, Designer |
Research & Narrative Design, Sound Design, Documentation | https://nataliia-sviridenko.webflow.io/ |
| Senne Oogink | Artist |
Character Art, Rigging, Animation | https://www.artstation.com/senneoogink1 |
| Sorana Verzes | Artist |
https://soranaverzes.artstation.com/ | |
| Stephanie Extercatte | Artist |
Unreal Engine, general 3D art | https://www.artstation.com/temaeya |
| Wouter Meermans | Designer |
Sound Design, Coding, UI/UX | https://wmeermans.netlify.app/ |
And here is a link to the shared team devlog, which we all worked on together: https://weavingfactory.notion.site/Team-Devlog-95e4e75c1b844af3b7cf4ee665f2f8f8 I contributed this part: https://weavingfactory.notion.site/Team-Devlog-Contribution-17f1a54fd67a8054926fd5dc40a2ed5b (Later, I adapted what I wrote there to two posts for my professional blog (which is part of my portfolio).)
I used the Design Thinking model to prioritise and keep track of my goals. This made documentation much more difficult, because, instead of doing design thinking, I am more used to just doing what is necessary. However, I tried my hardest to stick to the different phases, and to not do things out of order too much. This wasted a lot of time. For future projects, I would like to look into different research methods that get in the way less, and that just allow me to get on with the job.
The actual research itself happened mostly through talking to other people (IRL and online), previous experience from my internship (which was an XR company) and Google searches. However, I also tested the workflows I made for my teammates with them in person. And of course due to Jenkins and GitHub Actions, a LOT of the testing went automatically, as well.
I started by writing down my learning goals for this project. I based them on what the assignment needed, and what I had been wanting to learn anyway. This helped keep me motivated throughout the project, because it was both something I wanted, and something that would benefit the project.