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Creating an interactive building for VR

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Dorian Zgraggen writes:

As a school project, I created an interactive building for virtual reality using Blender, Substance Designer, Substance Painter, MakeHuman, Unreal Engine 4 and C++. Inside the building, the user can teleport around and change the materials of various objects.

Here’s a quick demo video:

Modeling the building

As with most projects, I started drafting the scene on paper. Relatively quickly, I switched to blocking out ideas in Blender to see whether they work in 3D or not.

Below you see two ideas I started modeling in Blender. A much smaller version of the second building was the one I ended up using.

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Eevee’s real-time rendering capabilities allowed for prototyping various types of windows and seeing what kind of shadows are produced. (The blue humans were used to get a better feel for the proportions.)

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In the scene, I also used some 3D models by the furniture company Vitra and the plumbing company Kohler, which I retopologized using the snapping feature and the shrinkwrap modifier.

Below you see the original model in comparison to the retopologized one.

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Since one of the chairs was made out of multiple materials, but the software needed objects with one changeable material only, I baked a mask with Cycles which I then used in Unreal Engine to lerp between different colors. This resulted in a nice way to choose the colors in Unreal Engine and also is much more performant than baking different color maps for differently colored chairs.

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One problem I ran into when trying to model the elevator was finding multiple reference photos of the same elevator, so I shot my own. You can download them for free here.

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Creating materials

For the building I created 24 new PBR textures using Substance Designer, which are available to download for free.

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Making it interactive

Blender was also used as a prototyping tool to come up with new ideas for the user interface and the teleportation marker.

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The hands are based on a model from BlendSwap which I then rigged to make them hold the controller.

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Coding was done using Unreal Engine and C++.

Further information, future updates and the full C++ code can be found on my portfolio.

About the Author

Dorian Zgraggen

I run cgbookcase.com, a site with free pbr textures.

4 Comments

  1. Great Job. Sounds like you went from Idea to finished with not a lot obstacles in your way. Was that more because you sketched out the idea first or as a result of your proficiency with Blender?

    • Thanks! I think it was a combination of both. Sketching the building first helped a lot when creating the final model and I was already comfortable modeling with Blender. I ran into lots of errors when doing stuff in Unreal and coding it tough, which sometimes felt a bit frustrating (but I learned a lot :D).

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