GenreOpen World ExplorationPlatformVirtual RealityRolePlanning, Level Design, Development, Assets, UXYear2019

An interactive, low poly, tropical environment designed for exploration. I worked on this project solo and was involved from start to finish. I curated the assets, designed the level environment, and added the lighting, particles, sounds, etc. Iterating on the previous Explore project, the scene is packed with much more animals, foliage, and other dynamic components. Everything looks beautiful and feels immersive. I think it's a great example of what I'm capable of.

Insights & Highlights

I was able to work on this project by myself since most of our assets were sourced online. Before doing so, I curated the models and optimized them to take advantage of static batching. Since the models are from different assets, they use different materials, which leads to multiple draw calls. Using a tool to pack the materials into one, I cut down on batches & draw calls and gained a lot more headroom.

Issues & Challenges

Water is a problematic subject to render in VR. Many water shaders are not single pass rendering, and even the ones that are, are usually not performant enough for mobile.

Another small issue was creating the NavMesh for the environment, our tool doesn’t display properly on non-flat surfaces. It’s deeply linked to Unity’s NavMesh so it’s not easy to fix, instead I manually made the path using primitives.