"More Than Meets The Eye" Animated VR Experience

Modelling a London sight-seeing bus. The actual buses are yellow, however I want the viewer to have no doubt at all about what vehicle they are sat on. The yellow could have been a tractor or JCB digger. References imported for the seat fabric (which oddly is being sold on ebay!) Tests created today with dissolve transparency on smoke and wind. The smoke is fine and the wind barely shows up. 

 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...

Test 103 - with sound

 

Getting to grips with animating spawn areas, using stepped interpolation. Meaning, camera angles that jump abruptly from one view to another. Sally's world is becoming defined and I've animated a tube train, using transform keys, to arrive on the platform. Screen shots below showing the spawn area (camera view) indicated by a view finder and cross hair. Although the viewer will be able to look in a 360 degree direction, by targeting the camera view in the direction of the action, the viewer will be lead through the narrative.