"More Than Meets The Eye" Animated VR Experience

Reimporting the escalator asset into a new scene. The transition between Sally's world will be an escalator that arrives slap bang in the midst of Piccadilly Circus. Taxis driving past, rain, road water splashes and an animated bus with moving colour to represent metal catching surrounding lighting, are the immediate scene at the top of the escalator. The spawn camera is set on the escalator and, using transform animation keys, moves slowly as if the viewer is on the escalator. A stepped interpolation, meaning a jump between animation movements, rather than for example the smooth transition of a liner interpolation, means that I could reposition the camera. Snapping onto the top of a sight-seeing bus, the viewer is immediately transported and moves through Piccadilly Circus. Ideally the spawn camera would be placed in a group folder with the bus. The group folder would have transformation keys applied, so that all 'children' within the folder would move simultaneously and f...

 I've used reflected buildings to imply both rain on the road, plus reference to the city underground. The road is invisible and I've used animated rain splashes, using an animbrush to indicate where the ground plane would be. Adjustment of the size of the splashes as they didn't read clearly, when viewed on the Quest. Used the thicken tool, whilst the animation loop was active and created some heavier strokes.  Creation also of the beginnings of the willow tree.

 Creating the remaining buildings in Piccadilly Circus and some London taxi cabs. To create reflections, as these are moving vehicles, I used technical drawings as a template and then the anim brush to create multiple strokes over time, in different colours.

 Looked at the reflections idea afresh this morning. I decided to strip out all of the colourful floor graphics and photoshop reflection png files. It was too busy and, even though there was a lot going on visually, there was something missing. I was inspired by some construction  lines that I'd put in place previously. They extended below the floor level and gave the impression of reflections. I simplified the look, mirrored the buildings and gave them a dark blue wash. Pleased with the result as it also draws reference to Sally's comment in the previous section about the underground being like a mirror of the map above. The dark blue of the reflections is reminiscent of Sally's world too.  Image below showing the grey construction lines that provided the inspiration and the new reflected buildings in dark blue.

 Test photoshop files, taking snap shots of the Quill environment, importing into Photoshop and applying a Bokeh light effect and blur. Not sure this works, as the environment has moving colours but the reflective wet road doesn't. May simplify it with duplicated geometry here and there. More buildings modelled today. If I don't use the images on the floor, then they can be placed in the environment to save on memory and polygon counts.