Sprint 1 - Research on 3D assets and Environment

It has been established that this VR experience will take place in two different locations by two different users. The warehouse location in for resource gathering, and another location for building. As the primary 3D artist on the team, I've done research on what kind of furniture to use for the context of the experience. I took into account the difficulty of the building process as well as the theme they impose. As a result, it's been decided that a Living Room is the ideal location for a building environment.

I believe that as the experience is more visceral and genuine if the actions you perform match the environments you are in. As such, building simple furniture such as chairs, tables, or shelves make more sense if they are done within the environment they end up inhabiting. Below are a few reference images that I reviewed.

There's a mix of clean, fancy rooms, and messy ones that I looked at for diversity. From my research, the fancier rooms are what interior designers consider proper living rooms while the messier ones are what real people have in their living rooms. Upon investigating them, I found recurring pieces of furniture that can be found in them. These include Sofas, Chairs, Coffee Tables, Lamps, and a Cabinet.

Following these elements, I looked to IKEA for 3D models of the furniture in their catalogues as well as instructional manuals to how to put them together. Polatis is a website that has a wide library of 3D models from IKEA where I can freely download OBJ files. As for the instructional manuals, the IKEA website has them available for free to download, which is convenient and helpful.

Furniture that I think will be simple to implement into the scope of our project are as follow:

HEMNES Coffee Table: Model Assembly
INGOLF Chair: Model Assembly
HEMNES Bookshelf: Model Assembly

Comments

Storyboard and Physical Layout

I finished up on some graphical elements for the user interaction specification component of the proposal due this coming Friday. This includes the storyboard panels and the physical layout diagram. As I was researching Oculus Rift physical setups, I had to determine how many sensors we would need for our game. I believe that 2 sensors will be sufficient, since we do not need a true 360 degrees experience as the Builder player will primarily be focused on the 180 degree space in front of them (i.e. the fireplace, the TV, and building the furniture). Our game is not an action packed game with any running or shooting. Of course, the player will still be able to fully look around but they shouldn't have a great need to move in the other 180 degrees of space. This would also take into consideration accessibility to our game, because it costs extra to buy a third sensor (the Rift only comes with 2) as well as requiring adapters and wire extensions. I spent about 4 hours researching ...

Sprint 4 - Alpha Presentation and Furniture

This week, the team presented our proposal for our project as well as demonstrated the alpha build. In its current state, the living room and warehouse environments are at their most primitive states and will be developed further over time. In future plans, I will have to redesign the living room to allocate more space to the user. It's currently too small and claustrophobic, which makes it difficult for a VR user to have enough building space. I spent the days prior to the presentation polishing the design comps then producing OBJ files of the environments to insert into A-Frame. I did this by going back and forth between a-frame and Maya and resizing the scene until it was the ideal size. This way, Mitchell is able to simply drag and drop the obj into the project without having to tweak the transformations (~5hrs). Table Model with UVs Chair Model with UVs Shelf Model with UVs After the presentations, I began working on modelling the 3 pieces of furniture that pl...

Sprint 2 - 3D Modelling the Environments

This week's focus has mainly been on writing the design document and preparing for the alpha prototype (~2hrs). A great majority of the written sections in our proposal is complete while a large chunk of graphics remains to be developed in the coming week. The sooner the design document is complete, the better of an idea we have in how the project will turn out in the end. On my end, I am responsible for 3D modelling the environments that will be used in the alpha demo. These are also necessary for producing design comps. The environments will be very low poly environments using primitive shapes and basic forms to form the rooms, nothing too extravagant. Below are a few screenshots of the environments in their current state: Living Room (~3hrs) that will be played in VR and the Warehouse (~4hrs) on desktop; all modelled in Maya. Warehouse Back Side Warehouse Front Gate Warehouse Top-Down View Living Room Back View Living Room Front View Living Roo...

Build-a-Furniture

Search This Blog