EDICT OF WORMS
25/02/19 - 29/08/19
VR Walkthrough
Independent Project
BRIEF
This project was created for an Emerging Practices subject where we were tasked with working with emerging Softwares and techniques relevant to our fields of study. The brief was open-ended in terms of what kind of project we could create but we had to experiment and use tools we hadn't previously used while documenting each step of the process. My documentation can be found on the "Edict of Worms Production" site below. I decided to experiment with virtual reality by creating a 360 YouTube video walkthrough. However, later on, I was lucky enough to also turn this into a proper VR experience after being accepted into the Intro Exhibition.
VR WALKTHROUGH
Below is a recording of the VR walkthrough I created in Unity. You will see that the atmosphere changed drastically from the original Maya render. This is because many of thee lighting and fog effects didn't translate in the same way into Unity. However, I think the end result turned out much better in Unity even without some of the more advanced lighting and textures in the Maya renders.
YOUTUBE 360° WALKTHROUGH
This is the final 360 YouTube video and some 360 still frames. The number one problem I ran into when working on this project was that very high-resolution 8k renders are needed to create a 360 video of relatively good resolution. I could not render out an entire sequence with such big frames because I didn't have access to a render farm and the scene being heavy as it is. The highest resolution I could render out was 4k still renders.
MONSTER CREATION
The following monsters are re-interpretations of Hieronymous Bosch monsters. I decided to include them in this project because of how well they fit into an apocalyptic cathedral setting. ZBrush was one of the new tools I learned for this project and it was specifically in order to create organic models more efficiently. The work I did on these monsters was the first time I'd ever used ZBrush and I was rather proud of the results.
Adopting ZBrush into my workflow definitely made modeling more efficient and more intuitive for me. The following are all the assets I sculpted in ZBrush.
These are some of the assets which I textured in Substance Painter. Substance Painter was another program I hadn't used prior to this project and had to pick specifically for these models. At this stage, I was not yet comfortable with using smart materials and working with Substance Designer so I mostly relied on manually painting on the details with brushes.
ENVIRONMENT CREATION
The following are some renders of the cathedral in Maya. I sourced a number of royalty-free architectural models and textures from websites such as TurboSquid in order to meet deadlines as I initially had only 3 months to complete this project. The stained glass windows are hand-painted plastic sheets photographed and applied as textures to planes. This was done to emulate the texture of real stained-glass windows.
render TESTS
This is one of the earliest render tests. This was rendered at 1080 x 1920 but as you can see by converting it into a 360 video it has lost a lot of its resolution. In the end, I never solved the resolution issue.