Hydrothermia - Hydrothermal Vents Explorer
Date
Dec 2021
Medium
Unity (C#) / 3DsMax / Substance 3D Painter
Audience
College student / High school student
Client
Sam Bond – Immersive techniques
Roles
- Co-Art director: Yu-Sin Huang, Sydney Agger, Maryam Shabbir
- Project manager/designer: Sara Rutkowsk
- Technical director: Ivy Jiao
The primary goal was to learn about the types of organisms that live in deep-sea hydrothermal vent environments. We provide a general introduction to tube worms, mussels, shrimp, bacteria, and the octopus. To make learning more engaging, we have immersed the user into a submarine and played as an eccentric professor’s assistant who must catch these sea organisms and log them into a journal. Our second most important goal was to immerse users in an environment where they normally could not be (vents have extreme temperatures). This was done by placing the user in a submarine in a steampunk fashion, plus providing brief narrations over an intercom to make the user feel like they were being talked to by their professor. The environment also consists of vents spewing smoke and some sea organisms swaying or swimming to provide an underwater feel.
Prepare Model for Animation with Rigging
I created the vent shrimp model in Z-Brush and sent it to the rigging artist, Maryam Shabbir, to create rigging animation
Texture Painting
I used the Substance Painter to make the organisms look more accurate and realistic.
Animation
I animated arm movement in 3dsMax and imported it in Unity as fbx file.
Level of details
I took the asset developer role. Optimizing assets for the game environment is my learning goal. The most challenging part is how to create a realistic ocean with limited polygons. To create clusters of organisms, I used the level of details technique. I made models in two or three versions, high and low poly. The game only displays the high poly version when the player is close to the models. This technique helps save the processing power.
Final Product Gallery
