VR Project

Hello guys, welcome back. This week we had to tackle a really exciting project, we'll we work again in groups to realise a VR game, exciting right?! unfurtunally we can't do that because we're not in the studios to get access to the proper equioment like the headset and goggles se we have to realise a first person charachter game project instead (but still fun for my opinion).

I will link you the documentation down below to understand why we/I did that and lead through the process, follow me.

We started as usual with a brief and we a weird/challenging request, we have to choose one picture and write a charachter sheet personality for our character and put in the game, but there is a twist, we have to just put hints in the room to give it to the player the character vibes inside the game, so we don't have to actual model the character (good for me so far, I have to honing my modelling skills still). I'm leaving you my character sheet to give you an idea of what I thought and what my charachter would look like, after that you can enjoy the final video (down below) to see the end result and then I'll lead you through this amazing journey where I learnt a lot.

I'm telling you something and I don't want to look as a bad person but the day that we had the briefiing I woke up late and went for my walking morning routine and came back at home a little bit late so I missed the main topic but I was still in time for the randomly selection, this this we had the chance to choose our partners or been randomly assigned so I caught the occasion to directly pick Andru, Dylan and Kypras because I was randomly paired with Denis in the first place, after I texted them to see if they were free to join my group they replied me back saying that they were waiting for this opportunity to mesure our skills and work together. I was so excited for that, because I respect them for their works and their personality, they got strong skills and nice personalities so it was a pleasure work with them this time, I was curious enough to see what these strong personalities can put together, my only concern was that working with strong personalities can be a double edge sword like it can be a disaster or a big win and it definitely paid off.

As usual, we had a meeting right after the lecture was ended and we did a self evaluation for each one of us to understande the average level to make sure that everyone got their back for their week points, I beforehand I told them that since I learned so much with the Artistic garden on Unity my role would be the game designer because my modelling skills are not my forte for now so wouldn't keep the speed. After this little discussion, we've assigned the roles for each one of us and we all agreed that we had to keep all the work as tidy as possible in order to have everything in place and right on time so we can work easy and withouth rushing things. We agreed that we had to have some platforms to put all our ideas, our files and schedule in one or multiple place, Dylan created the Google Drive link to get access to the files and he also created the Miro board link to watch our mindmap for the project. Be organised is the first thing to do when you work in groups and especially if you're working remotly, I can't stress enough. (little note: be tidy and organised can save you a ton of time, so make sure to do that everytime you can, plus it's true that we are working on a University project but this little project are the right transition between research and work, long story short: organised project means nice potentially job pointers.)

The same day, before to leave the meeting, we make sure to have the charachter sheet ready the next day, we have to deliver this project in 3 weeks so even if we got extra time (artisti garden due in 1 week) we need to have everything in place even if the time is thight.

we meet the next day to put to vote the character to work with, we just spent roughly 3 hours to discuss by turn discussing which character is more appealing and coerent to work on, we gave each other feedbacks and we picked Dylan's character (no one liked mine, so sad, but we had so much fun with inside jokes for our charachter that was worth it.)

We finally picked the character and we were ready to start to sketche somethin to visualize the scene, so we put our ideas, references and colour palettes inside Miro board to see what we had in mind and we scheduled another meeting to discuss what we liked and what was working and what was not working for the project. I genuinely appreciate and like this meeting because all these strong personalities together makes you realise that something works or it's just a waste of time and effort, in fact I appreciate that my idea was too far and they make me realise that I was going off brief, I'm glad that we liked a little bit of everyone researches so we put everything together and re-assigned the role for the week and scheduled another meeting to see what was missing or on what we should work on a little more.

I can call the first week "the modelling/texturing" week, where my partecipation was appreciated but I spent this time to watch some Unity tutorials and ask around for feedback to see what I can do after they had the assets ready. I spent my week chilling on Youtube, taking notes and open Unity and play around to see if I was capable of doing what I had in mind.

This video is a result of a lot of testing between scripts went wrong and a lot of screaming, one of the point that we had to present in the end result it's the "grab" and "inspect" part, If you're working in a VR Unity/Unreal workspace when you set your file these actions are already present in the workspace, but since we were working with a First Person Character ( I will call him FPC) that assets need to run extra scripts in order to run the actual action in the game.

In this quick video I wanted to show to my partners that I was able to make the game more interactive since the scope of this project is to leave to the player the character's hints, so I did some quick studies to how to do a dialoge window, how to grab and rotate the objects and how to interact with them, in order to do that I had to play around with scripts and set the asset in a way that was game ready.

In the following GIF I put together a little workflow of what I worked on so far and explain the changes. The first image is showing the actual process when the assets are ready to put the engine, at the first glance everything is weird without textures and with a default material, when you are importing something modelled in Maya or Blender or Zbrush you need to export you model in OBJ in order to make the engine capable of read the file, so what I did I went in to the Google Drive file and downloaded all the assets ready from the guys and started to look the polycounts, how big they were and if it was anything to edit or adjust, then I proceded to assign every single texture to each one of them.

(remember when I said to keep everything tidy and organised? yeah, that's why.) I had some issues with the textures because it was the first time that I worked with a lot of assets all together and I didn't know that you can export your textures specifcly for game engine, so I didn't know what goes where, but after some trials and error I was able to put everything in place creating personal folders for specific needs (like: Asset's folder_Partner_Materials_Texture_OBJ_script_lights and so on). I spent the following days to assemble the scene based on Andru's sketch and trying to stay true on the sketch, busy days, I also play around with some assets and scripts to see if everythng that I did in the first week was working fine and it was, I also tried to make the game more interactive as possible introducing new elements like the background music and the music sounds when you hit or interact with an object.

I was almost done with the project when we had another small meeting to show how the room was going so far and after the feedback, after some trial and errors with some prospective mistakes, I make a little changed on the main room re modelling the groin vault to make possible to have a hole in the middle where I will put some particles effect.

Fun fact, we needed an entry and we opted for a loong corrider where I put a smoke cube with collision where it wasn't possible to go further then I import the groin vault and made an hole and closed the vault with some walls. My asstets contribuition it was smal but significat, I worked on the walls, the library part and the ground, playing around between Maya and Substance Painter. I don't know how many time I changed textures on them to stay true on the sketch and the character's profile. For the character's room we needed to create a mediaval/fantasy look so we aimed for this room profile and we the addition of the hole I had the chance to add the falling snow later (because the character is living in his hideout far from humans and in mostly winter conditions).

Two days before the deadline I had some feedback from the tutors to work a little bit on the extra texturing and lightning and they suggested me to go on HDRP (high definition rendering profile) so I watched some video and applied the changes, the diffrences between the before and after were so amazing it was a game changer but I had a big issue to tackle with straight after I swapped with the HDRP, it affected all the materials creating some weird artifacts no good looking and I had so much work to do still. The HDRP has different propeties that allows the engine to create more iper realistic looks in the game and in order to that it needs specific materials and settings, that's why I obitend weird artifacts. When I noticed that I had to call an emergecy meeting to explain the current situation and ask for extra time to deal with this problem as soon as possible.

After I fixed the problem everything was looking fine and nice but I still had to do the final touch, like assign every scripts for the each one of the interactble object and sound and we were so close to the deadline so I did the best I could to meet the deadline in time and sadly didn't have the time to add little extra textures on the asstets to make it pop.

(this is a short video to shof the before and after the use of HDRP)

I want to thanks my team for everything they did and be patience with my speed and learning journey, because I really enjoyed the journey where I learnt so many things and worked with different softweres in the same time to make this little room possible. The FPC is actually very small creature so the room looks bigger then normal but it is actual 3x3 unity units (1 unity unit=1 meter). I want to thank: -Kipras, for his critical feedback and his skills as a 2D designer and for his collaboration with the main object for the room, the frame and his 2D illustrations for the scrolls and family portrait, well done, good job! -Denis, for his hard work and effort churning out asset after asset, he made the chest, the coins and the feathers. I still mad at you for how many sub pieces that I had to manually texturing, but good job mate, you put a great effort and personality in each one of them! -Dylan, for cheering me up everytime I was concern about something and overthinking, for his brilliant character well thought into every single details, for his assets, well presented and well put together, he made the candles, the books and the wooden toys. I'm very happy to work with you, lovley assets with nice looks, well done!

-Andru, the man and the concept designer, without his sketch I was lost. He set the bar high from the begining with great expectations and really made every one of us do the best that we can for this project. He did lovley concept design for the room, the groin vaut (that I had to re model lately) and a masterpiece of a chair, the cherry on top. I have to thank him for his time spent with me going through feedback after feedback that gave me more critical eye and observation skills that I was missing for the big picture, he also helped me to stay in the brief. And me to put everything togheter, running scripts, assembling the room with lights, textures, assets, sounds, interactions and particles effects. I'm kidding, yes I did all of that but without this amazing teamwork this game it wasn't possible. Guys, this work is the result of our effort and learning curve. Thanks!