In this VR experience developed for Oculus Quest, the player must navigate a hydrothermal vent field to locate their quirky professor, making note of special organisms in their journal along the way. This project was created in collaboration with Sara Rutkowski, Xiaotian Jiao, Sydney Agger, and Yu-sin Huang. Sydney, Yu-sin, and I worked as Co-Art Directors to conceptualize the look and feel of the game as well to the create and optimize the final assets.   

My biggest challenge was figuring out how to rig certain animal models to heighten the immersive nature of our project. Custom rigs were created for the shrimp and octopus models using Blender’s Rigify plugin. The shrimp was modeled by Yu-sin Huang . Simple, looped motions were animated in Blender before being imported into Unity. Unity’s animation system was then used to animate the octopus moving within the environment, giving the illusion of interaction with the player and hydrothermal vents. Pre-rendered animations of shrimp swimming were projected onto 2-D planes that were coded to rotate with the viewer's line of sight to limit the amount of models and polygons in the game.