Virtual Worlds Projects
Virtual Worlds Professor Elizabeth Goins
Unreal Engine
Photoshop
Cinema4D
installation art
For this project, we had to adapt a real-world piece of installation art. I chose to recreate Olafur Eliasson's Life, an installation consisting of a museum flooded with pond water. I wanted to focus on themes of redefining human space and navigation, along with showing the synthesis and contrast of human and natural environments.
embedded stories
Our second project involved creating two characters based around a common theme and building spaces that represent them. I chose to create rooms based around two of Sufjan Steven's albums: The Age of Adz and Carrie & Lowell. The first room is a bedroom in a post-apocolyptic world, where a survivor has made his home and still creates music on his guitar despite the circumstances. Picking up an old photo on the dresser transports you to the same room in the past, where a person falls into hopelessness after the loss of their mother.
adaptation
The final project for Virtual Worlds was to adapt a non-interactive scene into an Unreal level. I chose to adapt the first contact scene from Denis Villeneuve's Arrival. I ended up creating a lot of custom materials to faithfully adapt the 'screen' that the aliens appear behind, as well as the displacement from water droplets on the character's protective visor. I modified the Unreal first person player controller to recreate the cinematic technique that Villeneuve uses with flipping the camera orientation to create disorienting perspectives. I also played with dynamic sound that amps up the intensity of the Jóhann Jóhannsson's score and the speed and intensity of the breathing as the player gets closer to the screen.
