Environment Artist - Modeling and Texturing
Piñata de la Muerte
VR Game - Group Project
My team and I created this project for our final assignment in the interactive and virtual environments course. We worked on this during the fall 2022 semester over a 6 week period. My contributions were to the UI, 3D modeling, texturing and VFX.
Project Goals and Software Overview
We wanted the game to be intuitive to first time VR players whose age ranged from older children to young adults
We want the users to feel like they were immersed in Mexican culture
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I modeled all my assets in Maya and textured them in substance painter. All assets that I created were imported and set dressed in Unreal Engine 5.0
Modeling
Below is a collection of some of the assets that I modeled and UV unwrapped. I modeled all of my assets in Maya.
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Texturing
Below is a collection of a few of the assets that I surfaced. I baked mesh maps and textured each asset in Substance Painter and exported to Unreal via the Unreal Engine 4 Packed setting.
VFX
Creating Concept for a Diegetic UI
Rather than a typical 2D crafted UI, Interfaces in VR are often time interactable objects made within the context of the game narrative. We took this idea of diegetics and placed the UI into our game level as a 3D object.
The object we chose to represent our UI is called an Ofrenda. In Mexican culture, the ofrenda is an alter to honor deceased ancestors during the Day of the Dead. The alter is usually tiered with the most important content at the top. You can typically find objects like picture frames, papel picado (paper mache), pan de muerto, candles, sugar skulls and more on the ofrendas.
I decided to create papel picado located on the first tier that when whacked would start or quit the game. The picture frames on the second tier would contain images and the names of my team members as a way of showing the credits for us as the content creators. Finally, the instructions on how to play the game would be located at the topmost tier for the player to read.
Project Management
To quickly iterate, I created an asset list and production schedule for my team in order to dedicate responsibilities. A copy of the schedule and additional project management documents can be found here.
In addition, I set up a Perforce workspace for my team to use as our method of Source Control. To do this I used an Amazon Web Services EC2 Instance in order to host the Helix core server.