Dev team: Zizhuo Wang, Leah Lee, Tsai-Yen Cleo Ko, James Finkel, Tuesday Becker
My role: 3D/2D artist and tech artist
1. Design Process
Double Birdemnity is a VR experience designed in Oculus Quest 2 to let the guest/player be a detective, trying to solve a case of stolen jewelry in a themed animal world set in the 40s. We designed the general style close to a film noir kind of visual.
Double Birdemnity is a BVW course project created in 2 weeks. The theme was naive guests. The goal was to have a guest/player with no information about the game enjoy the VR experience with no trouble inside Oculus Quest 2. In order to achieve it, we designed the environment of the playthrough to be a small but rich space. Then we continued by setting the theme to be in the 40s like in the noir films. It gave me a lot of materials to work with on the visual design because of its stylized nature.
I looked through many vintage furniture designs searching for ideas for the scene. And started prototyping inside Maya.
2. Modelling and prototyping
Reference:
The models are made with Maya and Substance Painter.
After seeing the scene prototype, I and the other artist Leah filled the space with the story and more details. Through the polishing phase, we had a lot of fun ideas from playtesters and also by playing it ourselves.
I designed the lighting and lightmap baking inside Unity to achieve better shadows, thus improving the overall graphic.
Then, I used Substance Designer to procedurally generate the wallpaper and the wooden floor material. It enhances the space aesthetically.
3. Character design
After completing the scene, I started thinking about our characters. Since two weeks was a short time for the project I wanted to find a fast and good way to design the characters. Then I went to the team saying we should make all of the characters be animals. It would add a layer of fun on top of what we had. And it was easier for me to finish all of the drawings since we only had less than a week to wrap it up. I drew inspiration from many animal-style illustrations. And we came up with interesting names for the animals that fit right into the story.
Reference:
Initial sketches:
I joked about making the goose on my phone case into the world and it ended up quite fun!
The names for our characters are Florence Von Swan, Lucie Goose, Benedict Bear, and Ruby Retriever. Picked by our producer/writer Tuesday Becker.
The illustration was created using Procreate on iPad
I also used Substance Designer to create procedural texture for the floor and wallpaper. Then import them into unity.
Rendering for the final scene:
In retrospect, having complete most of the scene design really helped me polish the space and spare time for the rest of the world-building. I added the record player at the last moment, then me and our programmer Cleo Ko attached the background music onto it and interactable. Players can remove the record disc and the music would pause, which turned out to be one of the most fun things to do inside the virtual world!