Having learnt many valuable lessons from last year's VR Project and becoming more familiar with Unreal and Blender, I wanted to continue along this trajectory and pursue my learning of these softwares.
The VR project began with me viewing the family kitchen and thinking about what we would want our new kitchen to look like. I later decided that I was not comfortable about the idea of using my own house as the basis for the project, so I decided that the best course of action would be to make a new interior design in a unique setting. This meant I did not have to spend time measuring and it would present less of a design challenge and more of a technical challenge focused on VR interactivity.
The main challenge was to strike a balance between creating a design that was functional. but also had some interesting characteristics. I wanted to create a modern design with a Greek influence; the best way I could think of communicating this idea was through textures and surfaces, for example, I wanted to have many white surfaces but accompanied by dark wooden accents. I also tried to add chairs, made from natural materials, similar to rattan or wicker, which would be more appropriate to warmer Greek weather. Through my research into Greek architecture, I noticed there was extensive use of blue as an accent colour, therefore, I tried to implement this into my design as well.
In my last project, I waited until everything was completed and arranged in Blender and then transported it into Unreal Engine, which was very late in the process. This resulted in many errors and glitches, some of which I did not have time to address, due to proximity of the submission date. This time around, I tried to change my process and instead used Blender to create a library of assets which could be more freely placed and arranged in Unreal Engine. This solved a big problem that I was having where the pivot point of an object (the area from which you could select and manipulate a model) was too far in the distance. To fix this problem, I placed all the objects I wanted in one place at the centre of my Blender file, before exporting.
The modelling process took far longer than expected, however, this was where I learnt the most. As I was modelling assets, I gradually learnt more efficient techniques for creating certain objects. Looking at videos online helped me greatly in honing my skills. My focus on the 3D models was to make them as efficient as possible, because I knew that adding too much detail would heavily impact the performance of my VR setup, lower frame rate and greatly increase lag. I left texturing until much later in the process, as I felt that the functionality was more important and I could wait until everything worked, before beautifying my design.
I was unsure how to design the space outside of the room because I wanted it to be interesting to look at, whilst keeping the design simple. I was also challenged by how I could implement plants/foliage to add some extra life into the design. I did not have time to make these assets, so I had to find some pre-made models.
It was during this stage, I was concerned about the amount of sources I was gathering, as I initially planned to provide the user with a selection of possible products. This started with two to three options, but eventually I settled on just using one set of furniture.
Interactivity was an element I tried focusing more on in this project than my last. The main interactive elements I was concerned about were sliding drawers and swinging cabinets and I tried to address this before large scale importing and arranging of assets took place.
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