Welding VR Environment

A project created for a Virtual Reality training simulation with the intention of introducing the player to the welding trade. With this project we had the freedom to be a little flexible with the setting, we landed on a ship. Like an escape room the player would move through the ship completing tasks before moving to the next.

This project was a really fun one to work on, I had the freedom to work on environment modeling, props, landscapes, and even built a tool in houdini for the railings of the ship (shout out Michael Ekker for the help on this one!). Being a small team at Up360 we generally utilized a midpoly workflow, however we had a little more time on this project and we made great use of it. From the planning stages, the whole team was involved in the design of the level, layout, and mechanics (shout out Jana Hafez for the fantastic Concepts and Art Direction). That also gave us some time to do a Highpoly/Lowpoly workflow for the hero assets (shout out Ritesh Kutty as the designer on this project) fully detailing how the assets would be used and what is need of them.

Optimization was a bit of a challenge as there were a lot of assets being rendered outside of the ship. Through LOD optimization, the unreal merging tool, and some culling, we were able to hit our targets. For the landscape, I threw something quick together in houdini and exported it out in static mesh chuncks. Doing the landscape in houdini gave us the freedom to art direct the location a little more without having to find the perfect asset pack to fill that void.