What's your job about?
As part of the whole boxer deal, Rheinmetall is also supplying simulators to train vehicle crews in a virtual environment. My part in this task is to create the visual components. We collect data from zones that the client wants made virtual, and then model key features. We use a combination of elevation and satellite data to help build the base terrain, and then populate it procedurally based on perceived areas of bushland.
Most days are generally spent tweaking the procedural algorithm or 3D modelling trees, structures, and sometimes vehicles to be implemented into the virtual environment.
What's your background?
I grew up here in Australia, so born and raised. I was always playing video games as a kid, and had a fascination with technology. There was a large robotics club at the school I graduated from that held a big part of my school life. I tried out engineering for a bit at uni before decided it wasn’t for me, so I tried for a career in video game design. I landed this job straight out of a bachelor of games, not quite what I was expecting to do, but it’s turned out to be a great opportunity.
Could someone with a different background do your job?
Possibly. I’ve found that this job requires a mix of creativity and technical knowledge. Creating game ready models while also trying to wrangle essentially 1990’s software is a strange challenge. It’s not a project that falls definitively under either arts, or programming, but a strange mix of both. A base knowledge of all things involved in building video games goes a long way.
What's the coolest thing about your job?
Yeah, so the travel has been great. I never expected to pick up a job that would fly me around the country like this one has. Also, the industry I was aiming for is notorious for poor workers conditions, so being here with a steady job and pay really is quite great.
What are the limitations of your job?
As far as the majority of work goes, I operate in a two man team, just me and another grad. There hasn’t been a lot of senior guidance, nor knowledge in what exactly we are doing. A lot of problems we’ve had to solve ourselves. It’s been a unique challenge, however, it has meant that we’ve spent weeks at a time banging our heads against a wall trying to get a simple yet major feature to actually work.
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