Virtual NASCAR Racing Simulation
Highlights
- Race systems used for horse racing in Unreal Engine 5 applied to NASCAR style car racing.
- Added configurable starting grid actor.
Event Video Processor
Highlights
- Developed macOS app to automatically extract individual videos and images from a single video capture several hours long containing hundreds of rendered events.
- Developed Unreal Engine 5 plugin to display event metadata during video capture.
Virtual Horses – Hurdles Racing Simulation
Highlights
- Extended the real-time horse racing in Unreal Engine with hurdles racing specific additions.
- Upgraded the project to Unreal Engine 5.
- Added crowd instancing system supporting dynamic placement of thousands of crowd members.
- Added artist positionable hurdles that the horses automatically jump with realistic variation.
- Added configurable walking start.
- Enhanced the development only drone camera for easier animator debugging.
- Assisted animator with fixing and optimising the horse animation blueprint.
Virtual Horses – Flats Racing Simulation
Highlights
- Extended the real-time race engine developed for greyhounds in Unreal Engine with horse racing specific additions.
- Added artist configurable time and weather scenarios within a single race track map.
- Created chase style camera for simulating dynamic vehicle and aerial footage, inheriting existing tracking imperfection simulations.
- Implemented configurable animation request system to add the appearance of random yet controlled runner actions, such as; jockey movements, whips, horse head shakes.
- Added variable runner support, with production runs from 6 runners (120 events) through 14 runners (2184 events). Capable of handling up to 24 runners with existing art assets, but limited by available hardware and audio assets.
Virtual Greyhounds Racing Simulation
Highlights
- Designed and implemented real-time race engine using Unreal Engine from scratch.
- Dynamically generated outcomes for all runners and winning places with determinate repeatable performances.
- Simulated realistic race ebb and flow as runners gain and lose position with multiple variations for the same final result, combined with natural greyhound behaviour.
- Simulated human camera operators with dynamic and realistically imperfect tracking, panning and zooming.
- Created race track builder to programmatically model and distribute the track surface and associated fixtures (guard rails, fences, lights, lure rail).
- Created dynamic special effects for particulate kick-up and surface footprints.
- Created video post-processing solution to automatically cut the captured races, while checking for run-time issues in the footage.
Virtual Race Audio Commentary Generation
Generated commentary combined with externally created visuals
Highlights
- Replaced the previous outsourced commentary solution that had poor quality and required extensive QA.
- Built the replacement from scratch in short timescales, resulting in commentary of reliably higher quality, increased flexibility, diagnostic reports and far less QA effort required.
- Algorithmically generated race commentary audio by combining race metadata of runner positions with pre-recorded audio clips of runner numbers, positions and phrases.
- Rejection of phrase choices with number position changes, preventing incorrect reads without failing previously valid results.
- Automatic retry of races that failed all section retries, using alternative phrase combinations.
- Ensured whole system remained deterministic despite the apparent random generation of the audio content.
Virtual Match Sports Video Compositing
Highlights
- Replaced manual use of Adobe After Effects with custom solution using multi-threading and Core Image, providing an elapsed time performance improvement from 20 times real-time processing to 2 times real-time, compositing around 250,000 image frames for all variations of a 15 video second clip.
- Composited multiple image layers with masking using a matrix of team combinations to efficiently generate over a hundred variations from the source renders of a single clip.
- Abstracted the core composite engine to support the layer combinations rendered for multiple sport types.
Virtual Football Highlight Streaming
Highlights
- Created match highlight sequences based on a match results message and a pool of hundreds of thousands of pre-rendered video clip variations.
- Combined video clips with dynamically composited match status overlays (score, replay) and transitions into a single video stream in real-time.
- Balanced processing load between the start-up phase and deferring into the live streaming in order to enable quick playback start without overloading the streaming server.