Life of a 3D modeler

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Open studio night

Open studio night went really well, we got a lot of interest from people and lots of feedback from our surveys.

We had two survey’s one before you start, this helped us gauge who our audience was and a final feedback survey after the experience. The results shows that majority of people that tried Locked were between 20 and 24, which is well within our target audience, which is good news.

One key thing we found was that many people found themselves lost which we realise is due to a lack of audio and visual prompts. We did end up having to guide some people. Another thing we realised is that this may have been some people’s first experience with VR, so some people didn’t know the controls. I think we could improve by having a starting tutorial area that would teach people how to pick up/interact with objects and navigate. 

Set up of our info corner showcasing posters, concept art, workflow, logo design, processes and videos on Ipads. Only thing is that people had to walk through the play area to get to the wall. Next time we should have rearranged the VR space and table to make access easier.

I found that using the laptop to display the VR perspective was too small and so some people didn’t notice it until we told them. I would have liked a TV for that but we couldn’t due to limitations in space. 

We each took turns making sure the player didn’t trip over the wire or get tangled. Shout outs to Talia for trying Locked out.

Overall it was a great night, lots of feedback and had a great time seeing people enjoy trying out what we made. I actually had quite a few people tell me (and showed me) my shadow creature was scary. I’m glad it did it’s job. Thanks everyone that tried out Locked and good job team. 

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Security camera blink

We wanted to add a red camera light blink to add a red light source to the room to give it that evil atmosphere but also some subtle life to the fairly empty room.

So I learnt a lot from my last cat lamp script. This time was not as bad as the cat lamp since it doesn’t involve player input but I found it difficult because there was two commands I didn’t know about and that’s Coroutines and WaitForSeconds. The light can be seen in the interrogation room video

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Programming cat lamp 2

So originally I was trying to make this work by having 2 different objects. One with an emissive material on it and one without and then make the emissive one invisible while the normal one is visible.

I finally figured out here to get the gameobject’s light component and turn it on and off but also change the emission so that it looks like the object isnt glowing anymore either.

I thought that was all fine with just pressing the up arrow key but getting it to work in VR was another story.

Here I got it to work with an OnTriggerEnter and it looks at whether or not the object is on or off from the start so the script can be added to other objects. If it’s on it will turn off and if its off from the start it will turn on, together with change the emission and play a click sound.

This was such a mission trying to get working, but i still enjoyed learning coding again and I really do hope I can improve on it in future.

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Programming Cat lamp on/off

So I started programming only to find myself stuck. I don’t hate programming  but I have not programmed in c# in so long, so I’m re-learning it from scratch. I tried all day trying to get the light interaction working with the cat lamp but I just couldn’t get it working properly. The closest I got was turning it on and then it would just flick straight back off.

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Locked Bloopers

Edited by : Samy

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Locked Game play video

This is a full play through of our VR experience “Locked” so far.  

Edited by : Traz Davids

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Video editing 2

I was busy in the morning, so Samy had to act for the rest of the recordings in my place. We get all of the footage needed and I finished up the video without any other issues.

My only feedback I have is that once the settings were fixed the second time, the video quality is better in the second half of the video. For the most part it isn’t that noticeable but just a small thing to note is that we should make sure next time all of the recording settings are good before we start. 

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Video recording

Carol recorded me acting for footage for the video. Before each scene, I would read through the storyboard Charina made and use that as a script. We would do multiple takes to make sure I have enough footage to choose from just in case.

For the most part everything went well until we realised that the footage recorded on Carol’s OBS was recorded in the wrong format and Adobe Premier pro cant recognize it, so we ended up having to re-record some footage and convert others.

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Locked Video editing 1

So this shows that my one coms paper from last year actually came in handy. The video is coming along well, however I we should have set up the recording software a little better as I had to scale the footage up cut off the rest so it would fit the screen which resulted in lower quality footage.  

There are still a couple of shots that need to be done. None of the recordings have sounds so I’ve been adding in sound effects from the game files and adding them in manually. I’ve also manually key framed the sound levels so it moves from right to left to give it that 3D sound VR experience.

I think next time we should have had the sounds implemented by the time we recorded and if we had more time I would have liked to add some in engine cinematic pan shots through the different levels.

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Interrogation room

The overall atmosphere for the room is meant to be creepy, and dark. The room is mostly clean and we used references for for the room. 

For the lighting I kept the main source of light the lamp and used hard shadows to make everything pop. To add interest I added the flashing red light on the camera to direct the players attention to the camera making them feel uneasy by making them feel like they are watched.

Originally we had just two chairs and the note but I felt like it was too clean and too symmetrical, so I added the chair on the ground with the bear to add points of interest and to let the player know the girl was there.

Finally I added the dust particle system to give it a more eerie feel and make it feel less empty. 

There are a couple of things I would have changed or added:

I think I would have preferred the light to dim on and off instead of a hard on and off

Added more points of interest in the first room in, maybe a control panel with camera footage.

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Interrogation Room: Part 1

The Interrogation room is a room made for the video and won’t be in the playable build. This room was made from the kidnappers room as a base, I duplicated it over and merged them. Reused the door assets and created lamp shades for the rooms. This was all done using Charina’s floor layout as reference. I also used some interrogation room images as reference from google.

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Shadow

With this character model originally I made a very skinny body. I was thinking something similar to slenderman with long pointy fingers and slender body. The issue I had with that though was he didn’t feel scary enough. (I lost the images of the original sculpt)

When I looked at the body’s form as a whole I thought to myself what makes a strong or scary character? I raised the shoulders and traps a bit more and widened the shoulders to make him a bit more top heavy . At the same time brought the stomach in and emphasized the rib cage to give him a scary zombie like figure.

The entire thing was sculpted in Zbrush and just did a quick Zremesh for decent topology to run and animate.

I spent a long time trying create the rig for this myself so I could learn how to rig in Maya since i know how to in Blender but not Maya. For the most part I got the rig somewhat working but I ran out of time to get the deformations right. So I ended up using Mixamo’s auto rigger and grabbed an idle animation. The auto rigger works surprisingly well. I think I might auto rig future character’s just for posing for renders.

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Kidnapper’s Room 

With the kidnapper’s room I made the block out and proper objects in Maya all in one scene I think this workflow worked a lot better because once one thing is to scale, everything else will be because you are modelling it with the room as reference.

I made sure the world lighting was very dark to help us create that sense of being trapped and added in some read lighting from through the curtains.

The one thing I messed up was that when I was looking at Charina’s concept for reference, I looked at the door and thought it was a sliding door closet. This was later fixed and replaced with a door.

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Curtains 

The curtains I created for myself a while back. Its a plane with a blend shape of a curtain I made in marvelous designer that’s been subdivided enough to bend naturally as a curtain.

I added cloth physics to it in Unity and added some wind velocity to it.

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Toy chest

This is closer to what the final chest would look like and is the main reference used for it. 

The base low poly model was made all in Maya, UV mapped and then exported into Zbrush.

In Zbrush I just subdivided the model and started sculpting the bolt and wood patterns. I’m happy with the wood but the bolts I think are too smooth around the edges and some of the edges on the model in general are too soft . I also moved the sides of the lid inwards more to make the metal edging more prominent but because the face there on the low poly mesh is flat it looks weird. I should have done the same on the low poly mesh.  

I took it into Substance to bake the high poly maps onto the low poly mesh but I think that the low poly needed to have more details to really make the bolts look better because they look very flat as the model is flat so reflecting on it now I think I should have made the bolts on the low poly mesh.

Lesson learnt: Add more geometry to low poly mesh or baking the high poly with drastic changes will look weird and flat. 

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Chest : Placeholder

I first started with this kind of chest so we had something as a placeholder until we finally decided on a chest. I had to change it also because we would need to put a lock on the front to keep it locked as part of the puzzle.

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Teddy Bear

A final Marmoset render of the teddy bear from the kids bedroom.

 The concept behind the bear is to convey a feel of discomfort and creepiness. The bear represents the little girl and the danger she’s in but also the childish innocence.