NAMRAKANT TAMRAKAR
Rigger / Technical Artist
HygieneCare
HygieneCare is an interactive experience to educate frontline healthcare workers on hand hygiene. Our goal is to educate nurses to wash hands more frequently, follow the hand hygiene protocols, and raise awareness of the importance of hand hygiene and achieve a behavior change. We worked with Allegheny Health Network and we were asked to created something for Healthcare Associated Infections (HAIs), which are the infections that patients acquire while receiving medical care. Proper training and education of hand hygiene can prevent HAIs and support their number one priority – to keep patients, staff, and visitors safe. Considering the ongoing pandemic, compliance with hand hygiene became more crucial than ever.
Platform: PC (Windows and MAC)
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Project Duration: 15 Weeks (Fall 2020)
Team: Huixin Luo (Producer & Programmer), Sitong Chen (3D Artist & Assistant Producer), Lai Wei (UI/UX Designer), Yue Yuan (UI/UX Designer), Mia Zhang (UI/UX Designer) and Namrakant Tamrakar (Programmer).
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My Role: As the only programmer in the team, I had to direct the team when faced some technical challenges and worked on Unity and C# to deliver our final project to the client before the deadline.
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Tools: Unity and C#, Unreal Engine 4 and Blueprints(later switched to Unity for deliverable), Perforce.
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Website: https://www.etc.cmu.edu/projects/hygienecare/
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Client: https://www.ahn.org/
We decided to create an interactive video style experience in Unreal Engine 4. Coming from the programming background with experience in software and web development, I thought learning Unreal Engine will be fairly easy. I did not consider the fact, which I learned the hard way later on, that to develop a game- I need to know how a game engine works. By the half semester, I felt comfortable with Unreal engine's cinematic and level sequencer but our design changed and we decided to add 2 mini-interactions in this. I would have needed more time to create that, which we didn't had, so we switched to Unity and C#.
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This decision was the crucial point for delivering the product to our client. I had to assure my team that switching at this point is the best technical direction I could have given. I got help from Huixin in Unity and we successfully delivered our project within the time. Our client was very satisfied with our final product.
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I learned Unity, C#, Unreal Engine 4 and blueprints in the hard way, i.e., learning and delivering at the same time which made me feel confident on working in any of these two game engines.
In the above video, you can see the progress in Unreal engine (UI and character texture were in progress). I used sequencer and added events at the frames where I had to trigger the button to proceed further with the story. I used blueprints at level and sequencer. I also worked on the camera and shots.