Virtual Horses – Hurdles Racing Simulation

Highlights

Extended the real-time horse racing in Unreal Engine with hurdles racing specific additions.
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 Upgrade

Generated commentary combined with internally created visuals

Highlights

Enhanced race commentary system to reject phrase choices with number position changes, preventing incorrect reads without failing otherwise valid results.
Compensated for increased phrase rejections by adding automatic retry of failed race sections with alternative phrases and rolling back to the previous good section.
Added 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 Race Audio Commentary Generation

Generated commentary combined with externally created visuals

Highlights

Replaced the previous outsourced commentary solution that had varied quality and required extensive QA.
Algorithmically generated race commentary by combining race meta data of runner positions with pre-recorded audio clips of runner numbers, positions and phrases.
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.
Implementation was applied to the data and content for generation of horse racing and greyhound racing commentary.

Virtual Football Highlight Creation and 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.