Year: 2019
Team: Mahnoor Shahid, Salisa Jatuweerapong, Yasmine Liang, and Nik Szafranek
My Role: Lighting & shader art, Animating in Unity Timeline, photogrammetry, rigging
Tools: Oculus SDK, MetaShape, Unity 3D, Blender, Cinemachine
Topics: collective dream theory, film editing conventions, perspectives as a narrative element, digital double
DREAMSCAPES VR
Photogrammetry, VR, Motion Capture
Dreamsscape is a virtual reality (VR) experience created by Salisa Jatuweerapong, Yasmin Liang, Mahnoor Shahid, and Nik Szafranek.
This cinematic experience seeks to explores the concept creating a collective dream by exploring the strange physics in a dreamscape. The VR experience uses a mixture of first and third person perspectives to emulate an out-of-body experience within a dream. Film making conventions are explored to create a believable dreamspace by the use of photo-realistic environments and spatial audio. Virtual avatars, motifs are used as continuity between the three scenes. With each scene, the dream progressively distorts to stranger dream physics.
This project is slightly inspired by Satoshi Kon's film, Paprika.
My role consisted of capturing photogrammetry, timing mocap animations and camera switches in Unity Timeline, and creating lighting.
The Bedroom
The bedroom scene establishes the feeling of a believable dream by the use of real physics. This scene also captures an out-of-body experience. The perspective switches from first person view to a third person view that teleports the camera to a different location. The viewer disassociates from a personal experience a sees their avatar from an outside perspective.
The Endless Hallway
The infinity hallway begins to distorts the real-life world physics into a surreal dreamspace. There is a timed transition from the hallway to a staircase which leads a void.
The void
This last scene is the most distant form reality with distorted dream physics. This scene has objects orbiting inside a torus shaped ocean.
The guiding orb
One of the early feedbacks we received was that the viewer would be left disoriented whenever there would be a cut scene. We settled on creating a glowing orb as a visual cue to guide the viewer to where they should transition next. The glowing orb ties all of the scene's together by being a focal point.
Motion Capture & Photogrammetry
Our original plan photogrammetry capture was too complex to rig to a mocap animation.
We opted to use animations and the avatar from Mixamo
Shader Graph
Using Unity's Shader Graph, I experimented with pulsing effects, colours and opacity.
Cinemachine
We used the Cinemachine to implement film editing techniques and animate smooth camera movements for a true cinematic effect.
This particular scene was an extra scene created by Yasmine Liang.
The Stairs was an extra scene composed by Yasmine Liang.