Taking part in this project was an incredibly valuable learning experience. The many challenges I faced while working on it offered a range of opportunities for me to explore novel approaches to environment design using Maya. In addition, by collaborating with VR students, I had a chance to familiarise myself with Unity: a piece of software I had never worked with before.
Given the additional time my group was allocated—which was needed due to issues arising from the interdisciplinary nature of the project—we were able to add memories, animations, and textures to our VR experience. These final touches allowed us to truly bring our project to life in a way that was consistent with the vision we had established from the start.
Through careful, conscientious work, I was able to overcome countless issues related to my models, many of which spanned from editing models to meet the requirements for Unity’s 3D engine. This proved more challenging than I had anticipated, as models which seemed perfectly fine in Maya often turned problematic in Unity. For example, I found that polygons sometimes became inverted, faces became see-through, floors lost their solid properties (causing players to fall through them), and assets generally looked different.
I and my groupmates overcame these issues through efficient collaboration enabled by frequent communication. This was achieved by sharing assets back and forth and providing feedback on what worked and what didn’t, what was possible and what wasn’t.
I edited my corridor, pod, and cell an estimated 78 times. This number reflects the extent I went to in order to resolve the most minute of issues for the models to work perfectly within Unity. While this was at times a frustrating process, seeing my models in the final version of our VR experience made it all worth it.
My group organised weekly meetings to discuss design matters. We provided each other with feedback and ideas while our individual contributions were taking shape. While this was in many ways a helpful process, it also caused delays, with people making suggestions or requesting changes too close to the deadline. It is partly because of these late suggestions and requests that my models went through so many changes, being under a pressured deadline (and therefore prone to errors) and behind schedule. It may have helped to have established more comprehensive and robust design guidelines from the start.
In the end, we overcame the before mentioned problem by setting a cut-off point for all 3D modelling and choosing to move on to texturing and other activities (such as animating memories), regardless of our opinions on design. This enabled us to work more swiftly toward the end goal and outcome.
These under-pressure conditions were similar to that I’d be facing working with others in the industry, so I welcomed this challenge and feel a lot more prepared for similar obstacles than I did before this project.
Overall, our VR experience met our initial goals, which were quite ambitious from the start. The story behind the experience is one of climate destruction and human loss; through our system of flashbacks, we hope to trigger deep emotions within the hearts of our audience, leading to an eye-opening moment of realisation that this is more than just a game.