Animal POV: Climate Change
is a single-player VR game that enables people to perceive the world through the bald eagles’ eyes.
One Semester Project with Clients
Platform: Unity, Oculus Quest 3
Software: Maya, Unity, Substance Painter, Adobe Photoshop, Gaea, Speedtree, Github
Role: Environment Technical Artist
The goal is to use the eagle as an example to illustrate the contrast in animals' habitat and life before and after climate change and to demonstrate how we, as humans, can help animals cope with problems arising from climate change.
Procedural Terrain Generation
Tree Packs & LODs
World Layout & Immersive Experience
Cutscene
Challenge 1 —— A meaningful layout, because it is such a big space, how to avoid players getting lost and keep them focused on important areas
Solution: Adding visual guidence: giant trees, UIUX rings, and breaking down the long journey with storytelling elements
Challenge 2 —— Make the virtual world believable
Solution: Researching what kind of trees will grow in bald eagle’s habitats and iterating to test which style fits our world best
Challenge 3—— Large open terrain, how to balance stylized and realistic style
Solution: Bring the blockout scene to Houdini to export Heightmap, then import it in Gaea for masking and texturing. The first iteration is too stylized, does not fit our game style, but with Gaea, it is very easy to test and iterate.
Challenge 4—— Players feel weird when trees pop out of nowhere, how to keep the trees while maintain VR performance
Solution: by creating LOD1 and LOD2, at LOD2 creating translucent sprite to reduce the overwhelmedness of the forest
