This term we did a collaborative project with the VR Students to create a virtual reality experience. We originally held a meetup at the park near the LCC building and chatted with other people from different courses to try and get a feeling for what other students had thought about doing regarding their courses and see about creating a group to collaborate with these students on a project.
Originally our group consisted of Myself, Lauren from the VR Program and another student from the VFX Program. We had a rough idea of approximately what we wanted to do, which was use our 3D Modelling and texturing skills along with the skills of a VR Student to create a surreal and trippy VR Experience.
Originally we had wanted to do something with liminal space builds, as shown previously in my blog, but then decided afterwards to go for a VR meditations style map similar to some VR Experiences Lauren had shown me. Me and Lauren met up around the 22nd regarding doing some initial planning for the scene as we only had a rough idea of what we wanted to do at this point. We cam up with a rough moodboard and presentation regarding this.
It was at this point that our group, That being Louis, Lauren and Myself, merged with the group of Atia, Carlotta and Rita. The Project would stay similar but would focus on groups of two creating a scene each and having three scenes total, so this didn’t affect my scene much.
After this i presented these details to our course leader, Kristos and discussed what we were doing with the project and how we had joined groups.
After all of the planning, i started going about creating some very rough geometric shapes and creating some splines around with the animations would approximately go along.
I experimented a lot with using the soft brush and extrusions to make some geometric style odd looking shapes to add into the kaleidascope or trippy feel of the scene.
This one wasn’t exactly as intended as the scaling for extruding was wrong, but it still kind of looked cool even as an error with a lot of illegal faces.
Now i had a somewhat solid object i wanted to animate. A lot of inspiration behind this little model came a lot from the doors used in God of War, a game that i was playing at the time and was interested in the 3D modelling and architecture of at the time, and when showing to a friend i think even subconsciously i may have taken inspiration from the Eye of Sauron in Lord of the Rings.
After this i started building out some more geometric style trippy objects, using a pyramid and changing the anchor point, then duplicating and flipping one of them to create small crystals. A lot of what i did for modelling and creating some of these objects was based around using duplicate special for accuracy in making object loop multiple times at different angles.
I also experimented with using a lot of deformers to animate things along a path and have them deform into odd shapes as they then went along the path as seen below.
This ended up being one of the experimentations i ended p not using, as it was simply not interesting enough for me to use and felt too complex. As it was many extrusions and would require a lot of Redoing UV’s just for something that may not look very good.
For this project i was originally going to use a lot of MASH for use in Animating a lot of the objects along set paths, with the Splines being less guides originally and more being an actual rail for the animations to animate along using MASH. For now a lot of the animation and modelling was coming along.
It was around this time of the project when i realized there was going to be a large problem with this scene. Seeing a scene like a trippy kaleidoscope is fine if the character is rooted to the spot, similar to a 360 Video you could play on a phone. However, a major problem regarding this was that the player could move around, and at the moment this scene had little to no room scale.
I had a small bit of previous experience with both VR and VR Games, having bought an oculus rift 2 previously in the year and another upon moving to the United Kingdom to begin working on VR Projects personally. While going through this i encountered both good and bad VR Games and had a video appear in which a game that wasn’t ported to VR properly was discussed, the video in discussion talked about a concept called roomscale, in which a player needs to feel like they’re part of the room in VR to be able to feel both immersed and have things function as intended. For example, moving your head with a headset on being moving the camera in VR so that you feel like you’re part of the scene as opposed to the entire scene moving with your head. The GIF below gives a visual reperesentation of room scale.
A problem that i noticed with the scene i was building was that at this point, the scene was multiple objects circling the player in a void. Aside from the actual animations playing around them, there was next to no room scale, as there was nothing tangible near the player for them to be able to feel around them.
Unfortunately at this point of the project, i ended up getting COVID-19. This severely impacted my progress for this project, and almost nothing was done for this scene for around 2 Weeks while i spent time recovering. This put a very large initial dent in the project as the time to complete the project was rapidly approaching. I had a call with Louis regarding the status of the project and what still needed to be done during this time as that was unfortunately one of the only things i could do.
One of the other very small things i could do was listen to music at the time. I hadn’t really thought about the sound of this scene for a long time until Lauren brought up to me that she needed a couple songs of what this should sound like before she would send these songs i had picked off to the sound department and have them create something similar. I looked at a multitude of different trippy songs or things that felt otherworldly to fit the theme. With a large portion of these songs being From the soundtrack of Subnautica by Simon chylinski and originally some of the music from Hades by Darren Korb. After refining these down to around 14 or so choices, i sent these off to Lauren to get her opinion. Listed below are some of the songs i had procured for inspiration.
Avoid the kelp – simon chylinski https://open.spotify.com/track/2ELjicjUGSOPmv8IjfadB0?si=ba64a5f47ca24026
Tendancy to float – simon chylinski https://open.spotify.com/track/6VxSKxaOsbAy2NUKUfrSif?si=c37d40d42b154d11
mushroom forests – simon chylinski https://open.spotify.com/track/6ipvVXq40yRRTSG1cT3CSO?si=b054f1073c6e411c
Lifetime – surfing https://open.spotify.com/track/5LyasyYr7dDoTYypnZ9A2k?si=4da1a1777e25457d
Home – Before the night – https://open.spotify.com/track/2xbIB8namqQMtWw6FZ26VB?si=c4d66797c13e4827
Alfa beach – corn truise https://open.spotify.com/track/4pPaUkwVBuaJU4drnX9vOB?si=689981c7d0b843fc
by the sea – one who likes mangoes https://open.spotify.com/track/0IdG88imkvXnJ7sUrc7E10?si=bbd524effa3b441e
Home – Resonance (Maybe not this one cause it’s a bit overplayed but still) – https://open.spotify.com/track/65r94rVdiMwqXyQFEr3tqT?si=d906938459424964
Not even gonna try and translate the title – 2 8 1 4 https://open.spotify.com/track/2WQp0WTZFKQCM7Wvy3msGL?si=72588c353c14447d
Afterwards Lauren gave me some feedback on these, and we decided to use some of the Simon Chylinski tracks to send to the audio dept as it fit closest with what we wanted.
Unfortunately at this point, we lost a group member due to non-participation in the project, as they had not helped with planning out any of the project or modelling anything, and I was now left to work on the scene that was meant to have two people working on it at once as one person, with time lost due to covid as well.
With all this said and done, I began creating a small area for the player to stand on to have room scale. I decided to make it a small floating island that would look fairly out of place to fit the trippy aesthetic.
One of the biggest difficulties i had with these islands was the UV’s. Previously my UV knowledge was not the best, with usually trying to just solve everything camera based and hoping it would work. I experimented a lot with these in making cuts in certain places, separating UV’s and textures where they would make sense, and then doing things like making unfolds or smoothing UV’s when needed.
When discussing this, me and Lauren also talked about interactions we would be able to do in VR, such as lighting a brazier in the middle, one which would act as a hub, account for room scale of the player, and also give the scene more depth and a place for users to step on as opposed to a flat plane. I added a high bumpmap to try and get he cobble texture looking really bumpy on the island as well, and most textures were taken from Polyhaven.
I used a lot of different sculpting tools to try and make the islands look different, and make it seem broken apart by making smaller variations of the original round island, using the sculpting tools i made them look somewhat organic and shrank them, and then went about redoing the UV’s on each as they needed to be rescaled after being sculpted and scaled so much.
After this i put in a small area light to get a feel for what it was looking like and started showing off some of the renders to Lauren and getting some feedback.
Usually while modelling, i take inspiration a lot from games, and will watch people play games on a second monitor, at the time i had been watching a friend play Dark Souls 3, and took inspiration for the brazier in that game to be the focal point of the main island in the trippy scene i was building.
I also did some very quick columns to give the scene some Y level verticality and made a quick render showing the progress.
At this point i started building out a lot more smaller islands and making the initial island larger as it felt a bit crowded. I had talked with Lauren about potentially making multiple islands and giving the scene a lot more to play around with in terms of functionality and interactivity in VR, and began work on making some smaller islands that would branch out from the original, utilising the same techniques of sculpting and UVing as before.
Around this time i met with both Atia and Lauren again to discuss the status of the project and how things were coming along, a problem with Lauren’s scene was that we were having issues with animating the penguin’s mouth. I had previously done animating with mouths in Unity based off what sound was being produced to then change to a certain face shape and suggested this. It had been a long time since i had done it and we would have to backburner it until the scenes were more done, however we knew that it could in fact be done and it would come down to time, until then atia would make face shapes for the facial animating of the penguin and i would work on my scene.
After a couple hours of this, i had my four islands and a rough outline of their size and spacing from eachother, as well as how many smaller island fragments would be around each, i then used XGen and the content browser to get a tree into the scene for one of the islands, a tree that would give it some more detail and be a place for a torch to be hung that would then light the brazier in the middle. The concept was that a player would grab the torch from the tree, then go to the campfire island and light it, then use the lit torch on the brazier to then make the scene light up.
I experimented with using a couple different trees and tweaking a lot of things to them such as the length of the leaves or even putting in no leaves as well.
After messing with XGen for a while, i realized there was some models that looked particularly ugly still. The columns were originally made as just a placeholder, so i went in and started adjusting UV’s to make it look more proper, adding a bumpmap and adding in more edge loops where needed.
I also did some experimentation with potentially making circular extrusions from the columns, but this didn’t really lead anywhere and only served to cause issues in the end.
Below is a comparison of one of the fixed columns on the right to the previous placeholders, with the top being more refined then before.
After this i ahd to go about making the brazier’s UV’s work properly, as currently it looked very stretched and warped around. I went about going through and fixing things, making cuts and doing unfolds and rescales where needed. I originally struggled very hard with UV’s but a lot of this was practice that made me start to feel more and more comfortable with it.
Maya then proceeded to hard crash, meaning i had to restart all of this all over again. After redoing the UV’s one last time, it was starting to look like things were a lot more proportional.
I then went about experimenting with taking chunks out of the columns to try and make them look cracked or decaying, however my way of approaching this was destroying faces and then trying to rebridge or weld things back together, and ended in a lot of illegal or just plain bad looking geometry, so i shelved this and worked on other things instead.
After this i started needing to make bridges to connect the islands for player to walk on. This in theory should have been very easy, but quickly turned into a massive headache, as getting the UV’s correct on these was much more difficult then i had anticipated.
I started getting some screenshots for the layout in a topdown view to show Lauren where things were going to be placed and how things would look around, though there was still a lot of work to do. Around this time as well, my professor Nick managed to supply my me with a higher resolution photo my the ESA for the skybox.
I then went about extruding and making a fireplace for the player to light the brazier with some logs around it. Thye extrusions were being wonky at first but i quickly managed to get it working and used a deformer with noise on a densly placed mesh to create a ground or soil object for the firepit. I had done this prior in C4D To create terrain, so this process wasn’t super difficult to figure out for me.
I wanted to also fill the last island with something larger, a chapel or small little castle for players to stand on the top of and see the animations. I went about building it out of some simple shapes as a placeholder and meant to come back to it. I originally attempted to cut holes and then make extrusions to make the interior, but then realized it would be a lot easier to make one wall and extrude from there as opposed to making a weird inside out cube mesh.
I then went about adding a soil texture to that firepit terrain i had and creating a really simple bumpmap in photoshop to get some even more terrain i also adjusted both the colour balance in maya and adjusted the UV’s on the campfire to match up properly and smooth the UV’s.
After this i repurposed some previous logs from my room build at the start of semester 1, but simply changed the logs to be mossy and sculpt and resize them a bit.
I then tweaked around with the tree and it’s animations as it came preloaded with animations when using XGen and i wanted a static tree, i then went about tweaking the UV’s of a lot of different things such as the pedestal in the middle and espeically the bridges. The bridges presented a massive problem when UVing, and i had to go about redoing the UV’s multiple times before getting it to work.
During the same day of fixing the UV’s, i had a call with Lauren to update her on the progress of the scene, and she brought up a problem, in that the textures from Maya weren’t properly importing to Unity. I had done imports from Blender and C4D To Unity before, and knew that there definitely was a way to do this, however i put this on the backburner and focused more on building the scene.
After this i started building out the rest of the castle, making sure to keep the UV’s clean as not doing so initially had caused issues previously. I went about fixing the UV’s in many ways, such as unfolding, and doing normal based UV solvers.
I went back to fixing some of the UV’s for the bridges, as i noticed there was some stretching and issue areas that i had previously not noticed, and adding some details like small holes in the sides of the bridge.
Afterwards i went back to texturing the castle, going about a different way of extruding walls to then make a cube, and bridging at the doorframe. Afterwards i needed to fix the UV’s.
I originally hated doing UV’s, but after fixing so many throughout this project i started to like doing them more and more. I also added some small extrusions on the tob to make it feel more like a castle.
One of the largest issues i had was connecting the large tower cylinder to the rest of the cube base. I did this by merging the two meshes, bridging them and going through a process of smoothing it and adjusting edge loops through a very long process, making sure to fix UV’s as i went along and smooth UV’s where needed.
I had this looking a lot better however it wasn’t perfect. I realized it was likely no one was going to see the top, but just in case i used a small cube to make it look like another wall on the top of the castle, extruded, uV’d and textured it, and covered up a lot of the portions on the base that looked a bit wonky from being bridged together.
After this i still wasn’t completely satisfied with the UV’s and went about fixing some things on them as the small extrusions on the top weren’t aligned with the outer walls, this took a lot of UV Merging and then editing UV’s to fix.
After fixing it up some more i decided to change the texture as it was originally the same texture as the bridges and looked kind of odd with it being reused. I also placed some more columns around the area to fill up space and left it for now.
A problem me and Lauren had learned early on was that there were issues with the lighting transferring over properly to Unity, and the lighting of the scene waas going to have many lanterns lighting the scene as at the moment it was very dark, i originally made a cage for the lantern however it didn’t end up being how i wanted it to be.
I then created a new lantern and used a bend deformer along with some sculpting tools to create a proper lantern, then duplicated it and spread them throughout the scene.
I then made a test render of approximately the lighting colour i wanted for each area and then the light in one of the lamps in the middle.
After this i went about adding some holes in the tower to make it look a bit better, and using duplicate special to make a plank of wood and create a spiral staircase leading to the top of the tower.
The scene was now coming together more and amore and i was a lot happier with the way it was turning out.
I ended up going through and tweaking the staircase so that it wasn’t so tightly packed, as i was worried about the player’s head clipping into the staircase above and this seemed much better.
I then went about importing this scene into Unity. Through a variety of different forum posts and videos i surmised that i would need to export it as an FBX, and in fact there was an option to export directly to Unity from Maya. However i would need to make sure all Files were linked properly and exactly and then export as an FBX file, and package the file properly in Unity to get the textures working. My unity knowledge was limited, but through some tutorials i managed to get the textures imported properly.
I realized that this file was on 30f instead of 20f which we needed to be working in, and had to go about changing my unity version. I also found that PSD’s didn’t translate very well with unity and would sometimes cause normal map generation to go red for some odd reason, resulting in red textures that needed to be fixed. Needless to say the file locations and exporting needed to be near flawless to work properly.
I then went about fixing some small things, like making the fire logs regular coloured and the twigs in the middle the same.
I also found an issue in that any adjustments like exposure on maya or changes through the Maya editor wouldn’t translate properly to Unity, and these changes needed to be done in Photoshop and reapplied.I also found that a problem with the tree was that it had shaders on and a texture that would only apply in unity. And i would need to export out the texture through converting the file to a PSD and then reapplying it from there so it could translate properly to Unity.
One thing that needed to be changed too was the skybox into a physical sphere as opposed to a sky dome as once again, lights don’t transfer over.
I unfortunately became sick yet again around this time, and had to work through it to try and get things done properly. At this time i was asked by a group member Atia if i could send a tutorial on how to import things properly to Unity. because the way that i did it was sourced from multiple different tutorials and blogposts, i created a short tutorial for my group members regarding how to import things properly to Unity. This tutorial was meant for internal use so it does contain profanity throughout it, and i am very out of it due to the sickness, though i needed to get this up so that my groupmates could use it, however in the end they ended up just exporting out an OBJ file and having the other groupmembers texture it in Unity, but it still does act as a fine tutorial.
At this point my sickness became much worse and i needed to be hospitalized, so no work was done for the next day and a half.
When i got back, i wanted to finish this project as it was close to completion and deadline time, and at the moment the only thing not done were the animations and VR interactions. I first experimented with animating some of my original assets i had made for animation, and using the anchor point and rotation tools to make things loop around the islands.
I also had to make sure when duplicating to copy an instance, as the copy would lose all functionality or baked in animations when duplicating.
I ended up having the original spiral animation break as the deformers ended up breaking, and experimented around with adding different colours and redoing the animation. I ended up having the object malform, though it was in a way i ended up liking and thought it would look good for the animation in the end and add to the trippy aesthetic.
However i then ended up making it a simple metallic texture similar to the rest of the objects., i also tweaked the diamonds pattern i had previously done, animated it and then reapplied the diamond texture i had previously made for them but upped the roughness so they would be more visible.
At his point the animation was basically done. I went about exporting it as an FBX and texted to make sure it would work by both checking it in Maya and then checking the FBX Export in Blender.
The only small hiccup was that there were two texture files not linking properly and there was a small issue with the firepit ground not going tot he correct spot in unity, i solved these small texture issues and moved some things in Unity, packaged off the Unity file and sent it off to Lauren to add the interactions.
After this, i made a final render of what the scene would look like barring the lighting that would need to be redone in Unity
After packaging this file in Unity and attending Lauren and Rita’s crit with them some of the feedback given was that for a trippy scene it needed to be more trippy, colourful and vibrant. Lauren then redid some of the textures to get this effect as showcased below.
Overall with this project, i feel like i learned a lot more about Exporting for different platforms, using Unity in general and especially UVing and fixing problems. Some of the issues we encountered was a group member dropping and me getting sick, halting progress on my scene fairly hard. Another issue i feel we had was scope creep, in which the scope of the original scene and overall project was simple at first but became more and more complex as time went along, thus making the project very difficult to finish with more work needing to be done then allowed with the allotted time. While i am somewhat happy with how this project turned out, i would have liked to add more things to the scene, get more feedback from professors and other students alike, and revise it further if we had more time. That being said i am happy with the outcome, what we achieved working together as a group and the overall product.