The People's War - WW2 VR Experience [UE4]
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The People's War is my final project I will be completing at the University of Hertfordshire. Its set during the Blitz bombings in a typical family home, its goal is to serve an interactive living museum piece in VR. During the experience you'll be able to explore the house and garden, the experience will end with you taking shelter in the Anderson during an air raid, getting a look at what many families faced throughout the war.
Here are some moodboards to give you an idea of what will be in the final environment:
Here are some moodboards to give you an idea of what will be in the final environment:
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Keep in mind that this environment is heavily work in progress, I've still got a lot of little changes I need to make to this area but at the moment I am calling it like 80% done. I need to add some patterned blankets over the white ones to make it look less like a hospital, I have a duvet mesh with a blanket over top on the top bunk but its a bit hard to see, I want to get nice checkered ones draped over. I have a lighting glitch on the left that I need to look into, I need to tweak lightmap UVs on a few objects to fix some seams, I need to add bolts along the top of the shelter roof, add flames to the candles, add the emissive maps, lots of over little things that should be done within the next couple days.
I've only started to think about the camera positioning recently, I am currently siding towards having a fixed position, as if you are sitting on the bench, otherwise your head would be right up at the roof as they are barely tall enough for 180cm guy. From that position you can see most the interesting parts of the environment looking around.
For the final experience my plan was to have a relaxing daytime setting where you can just roam around and take in the place, then have a more dramatic night time air raid too. So you'll be in the shelter experiencing the bombs dropping around you in VR, I definitely want to get some nice atmospheric effects going on during that.
The experience will likely have 2 modes
1. Free look/explore mode - start in kitchen, can exit into the garden where you can look around or continue to inside the anderson shelter. Just a nice, relaxing exploration of the environment on a bright day.
2. Air raid - start in kitchen in the evening, a kind of homely relaxing environment, music on etc, air raid sirens go off, you go through the garden seeing search lights and anti air explosions above, you enter the anderson shelter seated on the bench and wait out the air raid as bombs go off around. I am thinking of some kind of dramatic ending where you hear a bomb falling, and explosion and your screen cuts to black. Leaves a cool cliffhanger and a bit of a jump scare at the end. All this stuff is still kinda rough so I am open to any ideas.
Just a little update, you can see the checkered blanket I did last night. I am going to be doing a few more different patterned ones to get a bit of colour onto the smaller beds.
A chamber pot, comes with stains.
I got a pretty decent enamelled cast iron smart material out of this prop so I can use it for a ton of the pots in the kitchen
I plan to scan some little bits of food scraps to put on the plates just to add a little bit more life to them. I didn't want to add too much grime to the texture as I plan to reuse these throughout the kitchen too.
Finished the last of the beds with another sheet, pretty happy with how the fold turned out on this one. Works nicely with the potted light for some nice highlights.
An overview of the new props. I need to update a lot of the props with custom light-maps as I am not getting amazing results right now, but for now they'll be fine.
The next week is going to be focused on blocking the rest of the environment so I probably won't be getting much final art to show.
am feeling pretty happy with how believable the room feels at the moment, obviously in the final scene the shelves will be a lot more cluttered. The kitchen is a bit bigger than your average kitchen, just for gameplay reasons, otherwise it would be quite hard to move around and would feel cramped. I need to make a more realistic window frame structure, at the moment I've just thrown in a generic one. It feels like theres some dead space at the moment with the walls, they'll be a bit less bare once I get some props up on them. I'll eventually have stuff like aprons hanging from hooks, pots and pans etc.
My goal for the rest of this week is to get proper meshes for the room structure and then start working on the major props in the scene. Preferably I'd like to have some of the major props (table, cupboard larder, cabinets etc) done and in engine.
A floor material I worked on for the kitchen:
I should have a decent update on the kitchen in about a week or two.
I am not happy with how the big white cabinet looks so I planning to replace it with something like this:
I need to do quite a bit of lightmap fixing, especially on the shelves. That will be done soonish. I am going to be reworking the sink area a bit too, as the cabinets don't really fit with the sink at the moment.
I just realized that soon every witness of WW2 will be gone. It is very important for everyone to remember this time and how uninaginably scary it was.
I am living with my grandfather (he was born 1934) and we do talk about this sometimes. Although his memory is a bit vague, he lost his home and all that his family owned. Like so many people in Hamburg and so many people all over the world. One suggestion: Try to find any war witness and make a small interview and maybe you can add some of their descriptions to the experience you are creating. There are so few left, this is a good chance to capture someting special !
Looking forward to your final and good luck!
I did originally plan to have some kind of cinematic of the scene with a voice over of someones experience being player over top as part of the project, if I get time Ill look into doing something similar. It could be cool to have peoples stories being played throughout the house on the radio. I found some interviews online of peoples experiences during the Blitz so I can do a test at some point.
Its been a month now since I last showed this, so I guess its time for an update
I hit a motivational wall for nearly 2 weeks so I didn't get as much done as I wanted, feeling pretty good about this at the moment so progress should come at a decent rate. I will most likely work on this and polish the shelter until January then start on the garden.
I still have a few bits to finish, most notably the cooker which is still in blockout stage (I need to get better references for some bits), more clutter on some shelves and I want to add some aprons hanging up between the doors to add some interest to that wall. The larder will have some food added to it and I am going to add the rest of the rations to the cabinet on the left of the fireplace, I am going to use that area as a showcase of the rations.
Once the scene is done I will go back and polish some of the textures, roughness values need tweaking on some pots and I need to tweak normal details on the wooden props.
The mouldy look on the proof isn't intentional but I haven't focused too much on trying to fix it because it kind of fits. If anyone knows how to solve it I would appreciate any help
I went a bit quick with the mouse so you might want to slow it down a tad.