Farming Machine

We received an assignment of an external company called Dewulf, specialized in industrial harvesting vehicles, to make a VR simulation of their R3060 potato harvester. The aim was to use this simulator in the training of new employees and to give clients at foreign trade fairs the experience of harvesting a field without having the expensive machines at place. The team of 4 developers, that means there was no artist available, first of all created the machine and environment in 3D. Then we received a joystick and other hardware of that machine, to enhance the experience. The machine is driven through the use of a joystick and has 8 cameras to detect any errors while harvesting the field of crops. The joystick is connected to the VR simulator in order to use all the functionalities that are available in reality.

The project was so much fun because it was an amazing team to work with and it was my first experience with the Unreal Engine and this was quite challenging. My contribution to this project was the whole throttle input and engine setup. Moreover, I created the cockpit cams and a framework for this cam system, to make it easy to add extra cameras. The camera action views, which I also developed, were a request of the company itself. They wanted an extra screen showing the actions that are going on outside the field of view of the cockpit. Here too, I made a framework to add extra views more easily.

The team members: Sam Vermeir, Yoni Van Gucht, Jip Smetsers, Pieter Desender

We received a cum laude score for this project.

Screenshots from real machine.

Screenshots from the project.

Code snippets.