Base of Operations

Experience Type: Environment Design & Production for VR

Role: Author, XR Designer, Designer & Production Artist

Platform: PC-VR

Game Engine: Unreal Engine 4.23

Additional Tools: Blender 2.8, Substance Painter

The project was an exercise primarily in lighting. The objective was to optimize and implement volumetric lighting in a realistically rendered environment while ensuring performance on the PC-VR platform.

The lighting, material palette and general aesthetic of the environment were inspired by the set design and lighting of the Punisher television series. A certain environment from this series was used as the core reference to decide the nature of the lighting, the material and the colour palette. As a space, the environment is a dilapidated office. The environment is split into two sections, namely, the lobby and the main office space.

IDEATION

“I referred to the set design of The Punisher as my main inspiration for the environment’s mood.”

I was inspired by the grimy, low-key lighting and atmosphere of the set. The rusty, worn-out spaces also informed me of the kind of material palette to be used in the environment.

Above: Frames from an episode of The Punisher.

In addition to the references from The Punisher, I also looked at old office spaces of private detectives from the Noir genre of films. This gave me an idea of the layout of the office space as well as the kind of props that could be featured in the scene.

Above: Vintage office spaces from noir movies served as a reference for the organization of props.

Similar to other projects, Blender was used to create a block mesh of the scene and prototype its composition and basic lighting.

PRODUCTION

“Simulating volumetric lighting for VR required me to use a less expensive method than the usual one.”

Production began with the creation of a block-mesh environment in Blender. This was followed by replacing the block meshes with the final detailed meshes. The total poly-count and draw call number of the environment was kept as low as possible to ensure that there would be no issues in terms of performance in VR with Unreal Engine 4 was used to build the experience.

Above: The scene was modelled in Blender (Left) and textured using Substance Painter (Right).

In addition to optimizing the models and textures, a cheaper method to simulate volumetric light shafts was needed. Since utilizing fog and volumetric lighting was not an option for VR, the light shafts were made using a dynamic material with additional layers of dust particles.

Above: Dynamic volumetric shader created in Unreal Engine 4.