Lately, I have been on a bit of a binge having re-watched some of Hayao Miyazaki’s Films. I’ve taken great interest in his films use of movement and detail, particularly in their environments. I went through movies like Princess Mononoke, when the wind rises, Porco Rosso and cut together moments of motion in its environment. this could be grass blowing in the wind, fire, water and other environments.
I had a go at following a couple tutorials to come up with some procedural grass texture using noise. this prevented a tiling effect but as from above and at a distance as the grass strands become less defined the texture of the noise becomes more defined. After watching a procedural rock texture tutorial I took its use of volanoid node that creates a more painterly pattern than the blurry noise did before it.
wave node adds wind effect by animating its phase offset. This is getting me closer to the look I am aiming to create. now to build it in unity or unreal and play around with game engine optimisation. Implementing view port culling and angle culling as well as an un-culling horizon and edge detection in order to maintain the grasses silhouettes on the horison
Whilst looking for a model to use for my girl character I found these “MMD Vroid raincoat models” on Deviantart.com. MMD models are made for a piece of software called “MikuMikuDance” for the purpose of making CG fan dance videos. I have never used the software but MMD’s are widely used in the game “VRchat” as player Avatars. MMD and PMX files can be converted into FBX files with a Blender plugin “Give me all your cats” that comes with many useful features like quick material separation and automatic texture atlas.
The model was humanoid ready and only had to change the toes that had rigged themselves to the foot and the foot to the ankle. The model also came with bones weight painted to the “skirt” and hair that I let be for the time being as I plan to use the Dynamic Bones plugin that I purchased in the new year’s sale to add physics-driven swaying to them. In case, I don’t end up doing this I should remove the bones, as although having them their idle probably isn’t impacting performance greatly when it comes to optimising for mobile every little helps.
I modified the model to Simplify and optimise it for mobile VR cutting down from fifteen to five materials. Although I used only three material slots in unity but left two as to leave the option to use the model’s textured atlas in the event that I decide to change the visual style at a later point. I also decided to modify her clothes to align more with westerns abilities elongating her coat by scaling it along the Y-axis. I also made plans to add a hood similar to the one I sketched out in my Quill Maquet but decided that the character would probably read better if you could see her hair from behind.
I played around with different colour ideas originally believing I would use the Songs album cover as a direct colour reference and have the pink floor ripple to convey it as a liquid however this didn’t read as well as I would have liked. so regular blue water was what I ended up going with. and used Simple Sky, a gradient sky asset that covers up the solid sky that shared its colour with water plain, ging the appearance of an ongoing plain of water.
Double-sided “no cull” hair and clothes.
Unlit shaders { with GPU instancing turned on} gives me high-performance results that look good without lights present.
Room
I decided I want the girl to have a clear location rather than an indiscriminate void. So as I have been listening to a lot of Lo-Fi while making the “Game” I thought it would be cute to find the room used in a lot of the music playlist thumbnails. luckily there had been a challenge to recreate just that on Sketchfab and using there Blender plugin imported it into Blender to optimise the room for Unity. using Decimate, and creating and joining meshes. whilst creating a doorway with a separate material that I could attach a transparent portal shader to. Fully enclosing the model.
I created a version of the model with a box coming out the front to use as a transition point for the girl to switch her shaders however I discarded this version of the model as the box would reveal the wall around the portal as well as the girl.
I used the “Easy Combined” asset in unity to quickly join all the objects in the room into one mesh as to cut down on draw calls as seen in the Profiler.
Before
After
I found a Toxic Frog asset on the unity store. however, this frogs skeleton isn’t humanoid so if I wanted It do imitate the girl’s animations I would need to convert the frog. I moved the frog into a standing upright position in Blender pose mode and weight painted the eyes to move with the head. I then tried using CATS fix rig fusion this gave me a humanoid rig with blend shapes for the eyes mouth and tough still intact but unfortunately Maximo wouldn’t work with this setup.
Ended up removing the rig entirely and keeping the Pose enforced by CATS on the mesh and importing the hollow mesh in Maximo where it generated a new simpler mesh that naturally would work perfectly with Maximo’s motion capture library. It wasn’t quite that simple as the jaw seemed to be independent of head turns so using blender again I edited the weight baiting on the Jaw and head bone and used sculpting tools to slim down his body. In unity, I swapped his materials for URP unlit shaders similar to everything else and created an animation controller that would blend humanoid animtaions together.
Taking part of the global campus has been a great way to set my expectations and grow my understanding of what kind of work I am capable of producing at such an early point in my studies.
I had the pleasure of working with students from other LCC courses as well as students from Ryerson University Cannada, As Part of the “Global Campus Studio”. Students from Canada had started planing the project weeks prior to us UK students joining the progect.
The group’s idea revolved around having live performances in a vertical environment as an alternative to attending music festivals and Gigs. Having it presented as a social exuberance with an emphasis on sharing the digital space with converging musical taste creating a social meeting place for music lovers and creatives.
As the only student in the group studying VR, I found that I could help the others develop their understandings of the medium and the nature of the industry. Where we discussed the difficulties of presenting VR in a faithful way through other mediums like the once used in modern advertising. identifying that the is a divide in the market between mobile and desktop VR and help device ways to entice both audiences (Ongoing! tbf)
Distributing Maximo characters with partial system
Here are a couple of free FX files for cell-shaded style 3D graphics from Kristof Dedene and Lightning Boy Studio. worth checking these guys out links to their socials can be found via their youtube channels. I going to be sure to open these up myself later and see what makes them tick.
