My VFX Blog

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.

This week I worked on the edits my group wanted for the corridoor, final room and pod. Firstly, I added rags to the skeletons, as we wanted realism of destroyed clothes surrounding the bones of the people who were euthanised. I downloaded these assets and added them around the skeletons.

I swapped out the semi circle room design for the rectangle room I had made before. I then worked on making a broken ceiling. I copy and pasted the broken walls I had already to create a consistant design, deleted the faces on top of the final room and placed this on top.

I then changed the shape of the pod as it needed to be more rectangular with the feedback I got. I made it from a cube and it contained the same indent for the door as from before.

I made simple doors that will be more damaged when textured. Some will be open, ajar and some closed. The idea is that these will slide open, and there will be assets of open buttons on each door.

I lowered the celing slightly of the corridoor as we wanted it to have a more claustophobic feel in there. I had to keep this minimal however because it had to still correctly match the rest of the building’s height to be connected.

I then adjusted the skeletons so it looked like the child died in the mother’s arms. I placed the head below the child’s torso.

We then had our weekly group meeting in which I presented my work. The feedback to work on next week is:

• Make the sketons more dismembered
• Make child’s head bigger
• Make the pod more longer
• Add a reclinging chair and have the skeletons on there
• Have some doors ajar and open

We were also informed that we have a month extention to complete this fully, but a draft will be in the exhibition.

This week we tested our models in the VR headset to make sure it all worked. This week was a major week for trial and error, as it seemed my maya model had some errors when inputted into unity. I had to reverse faces as if the faces were inside out these would appear transparent in unity, I figured this problem lied with the amount of extruding I did to the model. With multiple back and forths, uploading different versions of my corridoor to one drive for VR testing:

I decided I needed to re-do the corridor. I needed to make it a more simple mesh so that texturing with the UVs and it’s compatibility with unity would be made much more simple.

I started by creating a simple cylinder and modifying the shape so it would suit the corridoors design still. I made it longer and added in edge loops where the doors would be.

I then started on extruding the door frames from the corridoor. I followed the same design but with less edges to work from and a more simple design. I only used edge loops that went all around the corridoor for consitancy.

The mesh was looking more simple, and while this took away from the design, we felt like practicality and ease were more our priority at the moment than design.

I then was asked by VR to detach the door frames to enable us to texture the doorframes seperately to the whole corridoor.

I added the design of the final room everyone agreed on the the corridoor, and edited the ramp so it would fit into the doorway of the corridoor and there would be no gaps.

Next, I worked on creating tthe pod in which the skeletons would be found in. I had been given a design from the group of what they wanted the pod to look like.

I made this design from a cylinder and kept the design simple to not bump into any more mesh problems.

I then asked the group where they wanted this pod to be, they said they wanted it to be below ground, and then be triggered to rise from the ground when the player enters the room, revealing the skeletons of the poeple that died in there.

I used boolean to make a hole in the ground and set the pod to be under the floor and able to rise when triggered.

I then had to start on adding skeletons to the pod. I downloaded skeleton and skull models that the group had picked from online. I then adjusted these to be laying on the ground of the pod. This was an initial draft, I will need to add a child skeleton and adjust the skeletons in the pod for the final version but this was just to bring to the meeting so people would know where they would be and how it would look in the pod.

At the end of the week, we had our weekly group meeting. We met up with the course leaders we were working with. The verdict was:

• They had changed their mind on the final room design, it needed to be more rectangular.
• The pod needed to be less circular.
• There needs to be children skeletons and they need to be broken apart.
• The ceiling needs to be lower and the room needs to be more narrow.
• There needs to be a broken ceiling.

As I was getting ready to texture my models, I needed to re-evaluate the design of my models to be in tune with other’s visions. With such a tight deadline, design inputs were brought in last week, so I thought these changes were a bit late coming and we should be on texturing and assets now. However, we resolved this by a tutor reccomending we apply for an EC form, being we are working with extrenal people and were slighly delayed in starting our project. This gives me a bit more time to finalise the designs again on my models.

Thhroughout the last two weeks we have started on the practical work of our project. We first looked at brutalist archuteicture for the shell of the building and how we wanted this to look like.

Whilst helping with the design ideas for the building itself, I also started actually creating the corridoor the player will walk through and th final room. We wanted a specific look for the corridoor, and I based my design off of the picture below.

I started by creating the shape with 7 sides and extruding this out to be longer. I then started making doorways that would fit the design also. I made them slightly slanted, fitting in with the corridoor itself and then creating a slanted shape at the top of the doorway. I then mirrored this and created 6 identical doorways going down the corridoor.

This design was a good start however the mesh on the doorways were messy and it could be improved visually overall. I decided to make a more simple slanted design for the doorways, with straighter edges. This would mean the mesh would be more compatible for Unity as well when it comes to inputting my models to VR. I then had to re do my corridor itself to enable it to be beveled, as somewhere along the design my mesh messed up meaning bevel didn’t work. Bevel gave the corridoor more depth and a subtle rounded shape. In the new design I also used boolean to mirror the corridoor, and dupliacted the shape to create beams going down the corridoor ceilings, this gave slight detail to the design.

Following a meeting with the team, and some feedback, I needed to make the corridoor longer, with five doors on each side. I used the same technique of duplication merging these together to create consistancy.

I then worked on starting to create the ‘final room’. We had alot of ideas for what this room would look like, however the main points were there had to be a broken wall, and it had to include a pod where the people arriving would be euthanised. I needed to create a claustophobic and morbid feel to this room. I decided to make many designs to bring back to the team so we could decide on the best one together.

First, I made a simple beveled cube. I aligned it to where our narrative instructor said he wanted the final room to be which was the second to last room on the left of the corridoor.

I then created a ramp leading down to the final room. Narritively we decided the sense of going down to your death could be emphisised by this design idea.

I then worked on a new design for the final room. This time I created a bevelled cube with less segments to create a more pointy design. The ramp design for this was similar however more steep and with more detail.

My final design would fit in better with the shell of the building as the design tends to be circular for the most part. I made a cut in half cyllinder and inserted an edge loop to create detail at the top. The ramp is more tricky for this design due to the mesh and polygon shape but this is something I will figure out if this design goes ahead.

I then decided to add more features to these three designs so we could see how they would look more finalised to decide on a design. I added two broken walls to the back of each design and a bed where the people would get euthanised.

I took these designs to the team and we decided that design 3 fitted the theme of the building best. However, some feedback was;

• Bed should be replaced with a cyllinder pod which rises from the ground
• Walls need to be blended in
• Meshes and normals appear transparent in unity and don’t align so these need to be fixed.