As the developer of the browser based ‘QE Prize Trophy Designer’, I’d like to take this opportunity to announce this exciting and unique Unity built project that was commissioned by the Queen Elizabeth Prize Foundation.
Queen Elizabeth Prize for Engineering
The Queen Elizabeth Prize for Engineering , is a prestigious £1 million international prize awarded for ground-breaking innovation in engineering that has been of global benefit to humanity. The aim being to discover and celebrate stories of engineering success, raise the international public profile of engineering and inspire new generations of engineers to take up the challenges of the future.
The purpose of the Trophy Designer is to enable young people (16 to 24 yrs) in the UK to design the iconic trophy that will be presented to the winner of the QE Prize. The winner of the ‘Create A Trophy’ will receive a £5,000 prize with their trophy being 3D printed and according to this BAE article,
The Trophy Designer
The Trophy Designer is a simple, yet powerful, browser based 3D design tool, enabling users to easily construct complex forms from a small collection of ‘magnetic like’ primitives, where the only limit is your imagination.
The basic building blocks (primitives) are known as Platonic Solids, named for the ancient Greek Philosopher Plato. They have many interesting properties, but we use them for their aesthetic beauty and symmetry. In the designer they act as though they are magnetic, allowing you to stick them together or pull them apart.
Interaction is simple. After clicking on the boxes to empty out the platonic solids onto the worktop, you just click to pick up a shape and then click to place it, either on the turntable or to a previously placed shape. Once you have placed a few shapes you can click and drag on one to ‘detach’ it, and all the shapes attached to it. Now you can click to place this ‘chain’ of shapes, presenting a powerful means of cloning sections.
For more information visit the Queen Elizabeth Prize for Engineering website.
Link to the ‘Create A Trophy’ competition http://www.qeprize.org/trophy
Direct link to the Trophy Design Application http://create.qeprize.org (requires Unity plug-in obviously)
Link for an early version of the manual (limited proofing, just in case the final version is not on the website yet)
You can watch a ‘Quick Start’ video tutorial here
Building the Trophy Designer Using Unity
The Trophy Designer is built with Unity which proved itself to be a wonderful IDE to work with, enabling us to focus on prototyping, experimenting and tweaking, instead of all the other mundane tasks. Indeed with a short two month development schedule (including designing) it was paramount to ensuring the project was delivered on time and met expectations.
Unity’s low-level of access was vital in many aspects, such as being able to procedurally generate the platonic solids due to various requirements such as getting perfect alignment, writing specific shaders to achieve the shadows on a transparent plane etc.
Unity also proved very helpful with its numerous support functions for dealing with the necessary parenting, transforms, matrices and vector maths required. Again this allowed us to focus on the more important aspects of project. In fact Unity often made it trivial to add new features, the only reason in the end many weren’t was due to lack of time.
There was only one specific issue with Unity and that is parent/child relationships appear to be dealt with using recursion, meaning with a deep enough tree you can get an overflow error. So even though I wrote my own non-recursive methods, I was still left at the whim of Unity’s built in methods.
The only other issue I have was that I could easily have worked on this project for many more months as there are so many features and user support that could be added. Nearly everyone who uses the design tool will have some idea or feature they would like to see added and we have pages of such ideas. Unfortunately we just lacked the time to implement them.
Thanks
