Author: RafaelFajardo

I am a designer, researcher, and educator. I am the founder and director of SWEAT, a loose collaborative dedicated to the creation of socially conscious videogames. I am a co-principle investigator for the P4 Games project and a co-investigator with the Institute for the Digital Humanities at the University of Denver. I am Associate Professor at the University of Denver where I am tenured in the School of Art and Art History. I teach in the Emergent Digital Practices program and in the Game Development program.

Unity – Using live links to proprietary 3D file formats

by  on  in Rafael Fajardo, research, resources, SWEAT 3.0, Work In Progress

Proprietary 3D application files Unity can also import, through conversion: Max, Maya, Blender, Cinema4D, Modo, Lightwave & Cheetah3D files, e.g. .MAX, .MB, .MA etc. Advantages: Quick iteration process (save the source file and Unity reimports) Simple initially Disadvantages: A licensed copy of that software must be installed on all machines using the Unity project Files can become bloated with unnecessary… Read more →

Unity – Asset Workflow

by  on  in Rafael Fajardo, research, resources, SWEAT 3.0, Work In Progress

Create Rough Asset Use any supported 3D modeling package to create a rough version of your asset. Our example will use Maya. Work with the asset until you are ready to save. For a list of applications that are supported by Unity, please see this page. http://docs.unity3d.com/Documentation/Manual/HOWTO-importObject.html Import When you save your asset initially, you should save it normally to… Read more →

Microsoft Is Teaching Kinect to Understand Sign Language [VIDEO]

by  on  in Rafael Fajardo, research, resources, SWEAT 3.0, Work In Progress

Microsoft Is Teaching Kinect to Understand Sign Language via Mashable. Microsoft researchers are working on ways to use the Kinect’s body-reading capabilities to understand sign language inputs. Microsoft Research Asia and the Chinese Academy of Sciences’ Institute of Computing Technology has collaborated to use the Kinect to help with computer sign-language recognition. As shown in the video above, they’ve demonstrated… Read more →

Unity – Modeling Characters for Optimal Performance

by  on  in Rafael Fajardo, research, resources, SWEAT 3.0, Work In Progress

Modeling Characters for Optimal Performance Below are some tips for designing character models to give optimal rendering speed. Use a Single Skinned Mesh Renderer You should use only a single skinned mesh renderer for each character. Unity optimizes animation using visibility culling and bounding volume updates and these optimizations are only activated if you use one animation component and one… Read more →

How Retail Stores Track You Using Your Smartphone (and How to Stop It)

by  on  in Rafael Fajardo, research, resources, SWEAT 3.0, Work In Progress

The New York Times broke the story earlier this week that a number of retail stores are either experimenting with or actively using technology that uses your phone’s Wi-Fi to track your movements around the store. We’re not talking about location within a few meters either—we’re talking about exact location. via How Retail Stores Track You Using Your Smartphone (and… Read more →