Ideas for MA Final Project

General Discussion
#1

Hi guys,

I need your help. So I only have two quarters left now in my Master’s Program. The next step for me is to pitch an idea for my MA Final Project. I have some loose ideas for what I would like to do. I wanted to reach out to our community and see if there were any interesting ideas I could get from you all. The project could be anything, could be some form of R&D that could benefit us all.

I am of course leaning towards shader/GameArt Pipeline type stuff.

Here are some things I have thought of so far, I am not particularly married to anything yet:

1.) Advanced Ocean Shader in UE4
2.) Weather system in UE4
3.) Houdini GameArt Pipeline Tools, something along the lines of what the guys at Gameloft have been doing with Houdini Gameloft Houdini Stuff
4.) Small cinematic realtime VFX sequence(maybe use niagara)(bit skeptical about this one, since niagara is still a work in progress)
Small Environment timelapse, foliage going through life cycle + all seasons or Destruction sequence etc.

Ideally, this project needs to be something I can finish in 2 and half months, I also need a strong case for why this would be beneficial to the realtime vfx community.

Also, if any of you Senior Artists are down to let me put you down as a Resource in my pitch that would be great.

If I come up with more ideas, I’ll probably just add to this list.

#2

I’d vote against 1 and 4.

  1. This will eventually turn into a heavy programming task of simulating waves, stitching them to lods, blending between opaque and translucent, bouyancy simulations for props, networking and so on. Doing just a shader for it is not big enough for a final project, and doing the whole kit and kaboodle is way too big.
  1. Don’t use Niagara as it’s not production ready and I guess you will treat this as a production. Also, how does the cinematic benefit the community?

2 and 3 could both be interesting depending on the scope you go for.

1 Like
#3

You do have a point on the Ocean shader, maybe that needs to be like a personal project I can work on at my own pace.

No 4 was lowest on that list for a reason, If anything I could share any techniques/ workflows I stumble across while working on it.

I would probably be most confident working on no2 since it’s going to be an environment I’m familiar with but I think at the moment I’m leaning towards option 3, even though it’s a little outside my comfort zone, since I am still relatively new to houdini.