Digital Media in Work and Play
ITEC 4110 Digital Media Project
Spring 2009
Kyle C Veitch
This paper details the 2009 Advance Digital Media projects created by Kyle
Veitch and worked on during the spring 2009 semester. The First section discusses my
expectations and goals for the semester. The next section will detail the software used in
creation of and in support to the projects. The third section will discuss some of the
challenges I had to overcome and the surprises that I came across during my work on
these projects. After that I will discuss the results of the projects. Followed next by my
conclusions on the projects and the course. Lastly I will discuss what I would like to do
in the future using the skills I obtained during this course.
Introduction
When I learned that we were going to get to create our own projects for this
course, I was very excited. I have always felt that the best way to learn how things work
is to dive right in and have to figure them out. So in designing my own projects I chose
areas of study that have always interested me. As well as being interesting I chose areas
that I hoped would challenge me to learn new complex software and result in me being
able to do things I couldn’t do before. For this purpose I chose to focus on two specific
areas, Forensic Audio Analysis, and three dimensional rendering. For the first project I
chose to create a project plan for the ITEC 2110 students in which they would use a
readily available forensic grade audio filtering program to isolate background sounds
from an audio file. For my primary project I chose to use an open source 3d rendering
software known as Blender to create 3d environments with the intention of creating a
short movie. During the course of the class however I decided to join up with two other
students to use my 3d environments to create a game environment in which their
characters could traverse.
Software
For the Forensic audio project I chose to use a software package called “Diamond
Cut Live Forensic.” I chose this software for two main reasons. Firstly, the company
offered a free demo version of the software that were we to purchase would cost over a
thousand dollars. Secondly the software offers a lot more tools and filters than I could
find using any open source packages. The fact that this is a professional software
package used by some of the top forensic departments in the country only added to my
desire to use it. The demo offered is fully unlocked in that all functions of the full
version of the software are available for 10 days, after which a serial code may be entered
to unlock the purchased version. For the project plan I wrote, the ten day trial will be
more than enough time to finish the project and post the results to the wiki. The software
itself while complicated in nature is intuitive and easy to use. The Graphic User Interface
consists of easily recognizable buttons and sliders which are simple to use. The science
behind the filters and how to use the filters properly is extremely complicated however.
Thankfully, there are many tutorials and forums from which helpful information can be
gathered. Since Diamond Cut Live Forensic is professional grade software, anything
learned during this project can be used if your career leads you down a forensic science
path.
For my main project I almost exclusively used the Blender open source 3D
content creation suite. Blender is an amazingly complex and versatile three dimensional
rendering tool which can be used to create both characters and environments for animated
movies and games. Blender uses incredibly detailed controls that allow you to modify
everything from the way light is affected by surfaces, to how gravity affects fluids. There
are an amazing amount of tutorials and guides for how to use areas of Blender. Also
because it’s an open source program, the communities of developers continuously
provide updates which increase the scope of the program, allowing for grater control in
future releases. Blender is entirely free and comparable in many ways to programs which
cost thousands of dollars.
Challenges and Surprises
For my initial forensic audio project I came across numerous challenges and
surprises. First off, since the project entails discovering hidden background information
from audio files your source audio file must be in an uncompressed format. This means
.mp3, .wav .aac, etc are not suitable audio formats as the information we are looking for
is often removed in order to compress the files to an acceptable level. The best format for
forensic filtering using Diamond Cut Live Forensic is .wav because it is an uncompressed
format in which none of the original information is lost. With my initial audio files I had
saved them as .mp3 files, this was very problematic because filtering was pretty
unsuccessful on those files. Another problem I ran into was the order in which I apply
filters. There are 2 types of forensic audio filters. There are ones that use a process that
remove obscuring data to make other areas clearer, and ones that simply amplify specific
areas without loss of data. The order in which you use these filters is very important.
Lossless must always come before lossy filters in order to preserve the sample. Also
what one filter amplifies another may decrease, and therefore some filters must not be
used in conjunction with others.
For my major Blender project I ran into multiple problems. First off when
designing my lamps I had a very hard time getting a halo effect for my streetlamps this
was mostly because I had designed them in another blender file and then imported them
into my workspace. During the importing the transparent texture for part of my
lampposts was replaced by a non ray transparent version of the material. For this reason
light could not escape from the lamp globes. I also had many problems with render
times. Some of my render would take hours to run while others would be incredibly fast.
I eventually narrowed this down to a ray tracing function that was part of my animation
preferences. Once I removed this preference, my animations were much faster. Another
major problem we ran into during our final stages was importing one of my partner’s
characters into my scene. The fact that his character had been created on another
computer somehow made it much harder to import into my scene. For some reason all of
the linked objects would not transfer properly. As of the time of our presentation we
were not able to correct this situation.
Results
For my forensic audio project I successfully developed 3 audio files which can be
filtered to discover a hidden message in the background. These audio files are post on
the wiki along with a project lesson plan intended for the ITEC 2110 Digital Media
student of future years. This lesson plan can be easily used to teach future student about
the basics of forensic audio filtering. These tools are useful for students who wish to
develop skills in digital media relating to the use of and preservation of audio files.
These skills will also be extremely useful for anyone who wishes to enter the growing
field of forensic audio enhancement. The final project plan is available on the wiki along
with links to tutorials and forums upon which there is a large amount of useful
information for the audio enthusiast.
My major Blender project resulted in a fully designed and rendered scene in
which characters could be imported at a later date for play. This scene consists of a street
lined with lamp posts each emitting a light source. The surrounding buildings consist of
a church, a home, and an auto repair shop. The sidewalks of the street are lined with
procedurally developed beech trees which were developed using an open source python
script called ngPlant. The street leads to the gate of a military base which is to be the
next level of the game. The background consists of a mountain scene against a starry
night sky. All of the light sources are accurate for a night time scene. In order to show
off the scene for our presentation I rendered 3 animated movies that consist of a camera
flying through the scene showing off many of its features. Two of the animations take
place at night, while the last takes place in a daytime version of the same scene. I also
took many single frame renders for use in our project and on the wiki site.
Conclusion
Knowing what I know now, there are many things I would have done differently.
Firstly, I would have spent more time researching how to make more advance textures so
as to give my Blender models a more professional look. I also would have found a way
to stitch multiple scenes together so that each could be designed as a single entity capable
of being imported into a final project. One of my early mistakes is that I favored the join
function over the parenting function. This created many problems later in my
development as I began to add textures to my models. I also would have limited my use
of polygons so that only areas that were visible by the camera made use of high polygon
models. This would make my scene far more efficient to render and much easier to
implement into our game. With the forensic audio project, I think I would have devoted
less time to trying to learn how each aspect of the software functioned. As the program is
a very advanced forensic tool, perhaps it was out of the scope of the project to use it in
the fashion that I did. The time I spend trying to play forensic detective could have been
better spent designing my major blender project. With more time I feel that our team
could have created a much more advanced game which we all would have learned a lot
more from.
Future Work
Now that I have developed some blender skills I would very much like to begin
experimenting with some more advanced and proprietary 3D rendering software. It is not
a slight on the blender project that I wish to do so, in fact I feel that the Blender project
may very well be one of the more advanced extrusion software packages available to
students. I would like to learn some other software packages in order to develop more
skills that will be useful when deciding what career I would like to pursue. In the future I
will continue to use Blender and tools like Blender to learn more about 3D rendering and
hopefully to produce interesting works. Given enough time I would love to create a short
animated movie. I think that a project of that magnitude would be extremely rewarding.