"More Than Meets The Eye" Animated VR Experience

 I've been immersed in thesis writing for the past few weeks, as my computer graphics card could not work with the demand from Quill and Quest. Now up to approx 57,000 words and my new computer is up and running. The Piccadilly Circus environment was too heavy, too detailed and the composition was lacking in anything dynamic. This week, after a supervisory meeting, I decided to deconstruct Aaron's environment, much like throwing toy building blocks randomly around a living room and repositioned them. Keeping the spawn camera animations as they were, this gave a fresh new perspective. As a result, creativity was unleashed, the buildings are simplified and a new curved roadway is in place. I've imported the backdrop from Sally's world, so there is cohesion between the two worlds. Keeping an eye on memory, polygon counts and draw calls too. Screen shot below of the new layout. I am going to use an aerial shot of Piccadilly Circus, when we move into David's world and he...

Working on the styling for Aaron's world today. A few screen shots to show the progression of the art direction. I was using photo reference to paint the buildings, but it became far too heavy and there was a disconnect between the overworked painted effect on the buildings, compared to the simplicity of the bus and the tube stops. There would also be a big disconnect between Sally's world and Aarons. The movie clip shows the final style - almost neon in appearance.

 Test journey for Piccadilly Circus and Aaron's world

I've decided to shuffle the soundtrack clips, so that we emerge from the underground immediately into Piccadilly Circus.  I've spent today roughing in the building positions, to establish what set pieces to build and what I don't need to include. As upload to the Quest requires a maximum draw call of 65 at any given time in the scene and 1.2 million polygons, anything I can do to cheat the look and avoid unnecessary geometry is vital. Screen grabs below show rough buildings drawn with the ribbon brush, reference photos taken from google maps, plus a screen shot taken directly from the google maps to get the layout of buildings.

The majority of Sally's world in the VR experience is, other than a few glitches and some animation for walking legs, complete. The ideas for David's world leading straight from Sally's world didn't seem to flow, or be as dramatic as I hoped. My training insists on leaving ideas alone if they're not working and to turn my attention to something else. In this case I've started working on Piccadilly Circus and I'm considering an escalator rising up from Sally's world and arriving near the statue of Eros. Roughed out the world layout, cheating and 'dressing to camera' - meaning, much like a real live action set, the buildings are simply facades and placed in position to work best with the camera view. I wanted a sky rather than a background and found a tutorial on how to paint an equirectangular image in photoshop. First time using 3D layers in photoshop and painting a skybox. Screen grabs below of progress...