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Building Virtual Worlds is a project course at the Entertainment Technology
Center (ETC), whose approach is to put together teams of four-five
students (combining programmers, modelers, painters, and sound designers),
to design a complete virtual world in a two-week crunch period, and
then reshuffle them into new teams, for a total of five iterations over the
course of the semester. As a result, we learn how to work under
intense pressure and deadlines, communicate effectively within
interdisciplinary teams, manage time and fellow students, and iteratively
develop a short experience for a client. The virtual worlds are usually designed for
a VR head-mounted display and are meant to be "playable" in real-time, so that
combined with the two-week time frame made quality modeling and animation a challenge.
For all of the following projects, I was the sole modeler and animator for the
team, and made all the pertaining rigs, sets, and sequences unless
otherwise noted.
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| ROUND 0.
During the practice round, I modeled a little baby dragon based on a mural I did as an undergraduate.
The hardest part in modeling him was reducing his poly count to under 2000 triangles. |
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Low-poly baby dragon:
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| ROUND 1. For this round, I was also the producer of
the team. The premise for this world was as follows: you are a bunny who is
racing to save your significant other from a rampaging gorilla. Your bunny mate is is trapped atop a moving train
and you must use a handcart, an original physical input device which we designed and constructed,
to catch up to the train. |
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The bunny:
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The gorilla who's chasing him:
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Animated clip for the ending:
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ROUND 2. We took a break from VR and explored the capabilities of the Sony AIBO dog.
Our group wanted to test if we could change people's perception of Aibo as being "cute and harmless" and ended up developing
a skit where Aibo was an evil dictator delivering a campaign speech, at the end of which he gets "hacked" and assassinated.
For his campaign, I improvised a quick propaganda sequence in Maya. |
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Choose format:
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ROUND 3. We attempted to put together a networked hang glider
simulation, and even went as far as to construct two enormous scaffolds with
hammocks to suspend the players along next to a sophisticated input device. Due to its
ambitiousness, this project earned us the First Penguin Award (so dubbed to commemorate the first penguin to dive into the
ocean to test whether there are sharks there). |
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First hang glider:
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Second hang glider:
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Overview of the island:
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ROUND 5. We created a sophisticated world centered around a small
child's search for his older brother within the ruins of a haunted house, striving to combine
emotive storytelling with meaningful interactivity.
For the interior, I researched and modeled over a dozen items of Victorian
furniture. All of the aspects for this project - including research, design,
modeling, and animation - took the most intense consecutive three weeks of my
life to complete. The VR does not do justice to the sets, so I also include
individual screenshots for the more worthy models. |
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The haunted house experience, consisting of an animated intro and outro
and a VR walkthrough:
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The haunted bed with mysteriously stirring sheets:
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The bathtub with a hanging apparition inside:
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The exterior of the haunted manor:
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More pictures will be forthcoming, so check back soon! |
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