Sprint 5 - Finishing the Furniture

This week, I completed modelling (4hrs) and texturing (7hrs) the furniture that will be used in the scene. It took longer than I expected because I had difficulty nailing down an art style while also working with new techniques in Substance Painter that I wasn't familiar with.

A big challenge was finding a style that I really liked and understanding how to achieve that. My experience is more in realistic modelling and texturing where it's easy to see where things don't look right. However, with stylized pieces, it's up to my own interpretation. I'm also working with a very base, low-resolution mesh because I want to avoid creating too much detail through normal or height maps. The simpler, the better, but, the simpler, the less there is to work with.

The grand solution in nailing down a flexible art style was through the use of ambient occlusion. By baking the same model over itself, I get an AO map, which already improves the look dramatically as it removes the flatness entirely. However, this wasn't enough, so by adding another AO layer to the texture but using different varieties of maps provided by Allegorithmic and tweaking their properties, I reached the result seen below.

Chair

Table

Shelf

The colours and patterns are prone to change as I build the environments in their entirety. Furthermore, I've learned a fair deal about how stylised assets behave and how to create them effectively this week. I learned that a part of the reason why I had a hard time getting the style is also that it needs an environment to fit in, which I did not have. It's challenging to build assets when I haven't finalised a mood board or stylised environment to compare with.

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[WEEK 1] Introducing our project...

Our goal is to make a cool VR game for Design Studio 3. The main idea involves a collaborative asymmetrical experience to build furniture virtually. There will be two roles in this game: a finder (to look for furniture pieces in the warehouse), and a builder (putting the parts together). We started this project on January 22, 2020 and are currently on our first 1 week sprint of development.

Sprint 10 - Adding more boxes and lots of scripting

As the final submission draws near, lots of work has yet to be done. Due to time constraints and the lack of resources in light of recent events, we made the decision to cut down our scope by removing VR functionality entirely and focus on desktop-to-desktop connection fully. With new goals in mind, I spent the beginning of the week by adding all the boxes for spawning furniture components. To do so, I started by replacing the blue boxes we used previously with stylised boxes that match the environment better. To tell the player what each box contains, an image of the rendered component is placed on each side. The challenge here was that I wanted to avoid creating a GLTF for every single box because it would have slowed down the page drastically. The solution was to instead use a single, universal GLTF for every box and placed images on each side of the box as explained previously (~6hrs). New Warehouse Area - Added new boxes Close up of updated box - Bright colours and side

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

Build-a-Furniture

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