daniellecole

[daniellecole]

Cornea City UE5 Environment

Inspired by two video game settings: The Eye of Helios from Borderlands, and the Switch game Cloudpunk (In Cloudpunk, a giant AI sphere is secretly controlling all the citizens in the city).

I used splines and blueprints to form skywalks and pathways. The skyscrapers are put together in blueprints as well to quickly fill the space. Glowing signs and small floor lights illuminate the paths and buildings.

[daniellecole]

UE5 Japanese Village

Environment Design made with pre-made models and the terrain sculpt. Settings for day/night view.

[daniellecole]

Model AD12

Nuke + Maya Compositing VFX Robot Project

[daniellecole]

Palm Point UE5 Environment

A pirate's paradise... explore the cove, and the hidden jungle inside.

Full map design and blueprint code for floating boats, fire animation and ocean waves.

[daniellecole]

YOUniverse Game Art

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[daniellecole]

GHOULWAY

Short Character Animation | Sheridan College 2024

Software: Maya, Substance Painter

Process

[daniellecole]

Who's On Helm?!

4th Year Advanced Game Development Project

A team of 4 students make a crew management game on the high seas!

Play the game here!

Character Sprites

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[daniellecole]

Swamp Shack Diorama

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[daniellecole]

Grotto: VR Experience

Grotto VR Development Dev Log

Grotto is a neon alien planet exploration simulator in VR, a game with vibrant, bioluminescent flora, where users must explore and interact with creatures/plants. 

The user slowly explores the “Grotto”. Picking up/touching objects responds in haptic feedback and interesting sounds.

Process

The project began working together with my teammate Anastacia, as we brainstormed ideas for a VR game for our VR/AR 4th year project. The rise of “zen” games are an industry favourite at the moment, and we were inspired by recent VR presentations at the 2023 OIAF like “Kabaret”. 

Modelling

We used a combination of models from scratch in Blender, and models we edited from Sketchfab. To keep our scope small, we aimed to have a slime, some moving flora, species of fish and a rocky environment. We re-textured, rigged and added shaders/glow effects.

Environment Design

We developed a rough draft of the map through instancing in Unity, until we were satisfied with the layout. We then replaced the graybox design with the re-coloured models like rocks and mushrooms.

Then the animated flora was imported in, using the animation set to "loop".

Simulations

A big part of our project was having fish surrounding the user. A lot of hours went into making fish swim around rigid bodies in the landscape, but also similar fish with the same Tags would flock together into a school of fish

Soft Body Simulation

Many objects in Grotto are "bouncy" and "touch-able". Soft bodies in Unity is not a basic setting, so to get around this I utilized rigs inside the objects, like the slimes, and made all the "bones" "springy". This allowed the models to be stretched and jiggle around.

Game Play

While being a chill game, we still wanted to give the user something to do. The thought came to us that the user could hit "Research Stations" like in a real aquarium, and learn about our fictional fish surrounding the environment. We also gave the user a "Scanner" in their right hand, to scan a beam at objects and learn their IDs.

Play Testing!

We had a great demo day allowing our classmates and other faculty to try out the finished product. Everyone seemed to love it, and enjoyed playing with the objects and the scanner.

Some things we did not expect from the play test is many players loved "throwing" objects as hard as they could towards the walls and out-of-bounds, which is something we didn't account for. This lead to the players have a goal of tossing as many objects as they could out of the map, or walking off the map entirely. Something we will update in the future!

Thanks again to the Carleton IT department and all of our beta and alpha testers we put in the headset! :)

[daniellecole]

[daniellecole]

Death Row: VR Horror Exhibit

Creating a Multi-Sensory Horror Experience in VR with Unity XR

Over the course of 8 months, my capstone team and I approached the project with the goal of creating a VR experience that was uncommon to the industry: a VR horror game that also uses spatial audio, 360° visual animation and real-life props.

With our love for creepy monsters and fake blood stashed, we started developing our pitches and concepts to present to our advisors. Some of our original ideas for VR horror movies included an insane asylum, a creepy circus full of surreal monsters, and a guy made out of hands that would reach out and touch you.

After a few weeks of reviews, we found the VR “films” needed to bring something more to the project than just storytelling. Focusing on how we could push the technical limitations, we found inspiration from several existing studies at Carleton about low-fidelity haptic feedback. Except one limitation: we had no budget. So the new version was born: our team of 6 students were going to dress up as mad scientists, make all of our classmates into “test subjects” for our new horror experience, and see how long they could stay in the VR experience until that became too scared.

Development Process

We wrote scripts for 3 VR films surrounding these 3 elements: sight, sound and touch. I was assigned the “sight” film, due to my experience as a visual artist. The idea centered around a creepy childhood bedroom where an “entity” was invading your home, with the user unable to move or protect themselves. I also aided with the development of the other two experiences: a sound based film where tiny creatures were whispering in your ear, and a touch-based autopsy experience where the user reaches into a dead body. Our experiences were called “The Gigglers” “3AM” and “Autopsy”.

After scripts were approved, we recorded voice lines with our own voices, modeled the environments and monsters, started animating, and recorded motion capture data. 

Technical Challenges

Although I had experience developing in Unity XR for the Meta quest headsets, there are always issues that appear with Unity. I struggled with importing my animation from Blender to Unity with the correct rigs. Some of my hands in Blender looked great with the animations, but the struggle was in viewing them VR. Do the hands reaching out to the user feel scary, or just silly? With proper texturing and placement, I eventually nailed it. Testing the animation in VR, I even jumpscared myself multiple times.

I then coded all the events for 3AM to play the animations at the right time. Since Dexter (our sound guy) was busy with the first audio experience, I also took up the mantle of making the whole audio design for 3AM. With no previous audio experience, I am happy the sound is decently good and “scary”. The random sounds (tapping, scratches and bumps in the night) helped push the VR experience to be truly haunting. 

I organized a few user tests for 3AM, and I was on my way to crafting and running a good quality VR program. Many of my users who tried out our Beta said it was unsettling and extremely tough to sit through. The 3AM experience included hands grabbing the user’s face, figures in the window, the closet opening, and finally a jumpscare of my main monster, a towering Skeleton man we named “Joey”.

In Unity, I developed scripts to cue the jumpscares at the right time with the correct sound effects. I played with the code settings to allow suspense to build up.  Unity XR

Developing VR in Unity came with its own challenges. We had an issue where the user would always spawn “floating” in the scene, so some code was needed to fix the XR origin node. I also had problems disabling and enabling hand tracking vs controller tracking. Next, I learned a lot by fixing problems with textures and file sizes to allow for low-poly objects and fast run times for the build. 

Motion Capture

After 3AM was polished and tested, I helped out on the tactical experience Autopsy. In my favorite room, the Carleton Mocap Production studio, I set up our dev Ryan in the mocap suit to act as our corpse-turned-serial killer. He acted out the voice lines and actions, and I recorded the motion capture data with Vicon Shogun. After some retargeting in Maya, the character was alive in Unity. 

Physical Props and Low-Budget “Haptics”

The biggest hurdle in the whole project was aligning the virtual game experience with the real-world table and props. From the dollar store, we bought soap, sponges, roap, feather dusters and compressed air to be our props. The user would place their hands on the table and we would proceed to make them reach their hands into the slime and rope (made to feel like intestines) and scaring them with dusting them (spiders crawling on them) and blasts of hair (jumpscare). The game world had to align perfectly with these events and perceived space.

Let the Horror Begin!

The project concluded with the anticipated end of year Capstone fair. Our stage was set; with bloody lab coats, a dark waiting room and VR tables with two headsets. Over 8 hours we presented to 40+ guests and had terrifying reactions (many were screaming). The judges of the fair included local game developers and recruiters of Ottawa,  and they said they were impressed with the creativity and new ideas our game could bring to the VR industry. 

Along with the success of Death Row, I gained experience with Unity VR development, modeling, sound design, character animation and lighting/post processing. Being the technical artist on the team I was crucial to solving a lot of big challenges that were halting the progress of our project, becoming the Unity XR wizard of the group. With the overwhelming positive feedback, our advisor pushed us to submit to the international conference SIGGRAPH, and I will be making a blog post about that soon.

Praise for Death Row

"The three scenarios with different sensory feedback modalities are also useful for exploring the effects of different sensory feedback on horror feeling. The idea of using researchers as “tactile props” is also quite creative, reminding me of Lung-Pan Cheng’s early work. Overall speaking, I like the aesthetic design of the game scenes, and I appreciate the creative method of providing multisensory feedback for VR users." - Capstone Fair Judge #1 "This project seeks to create sensations of horror in VR through various harmless haptic interactions. Even though I am personally not a fan of horror as a genre (too squeamish!), I think this is a cool set of ideas that is certainly relevant to the field of computer graphics" - Capstone Fair Judge #2