RiVR - VR Fire, Police, GOV Training
During my time at RiVR I worked on several confidential projects for the Police and fire services as well as other government sectors. Here is just a small amount of what I did to complete those projects, from scanned asset retopology and environment creation, tileable material creation, texture painting and shader creation. These projects worked towards RiVR Arc and became available in the library so that they could be used by clients as well as in house teams to quickly create new requested scenarios.
The Alley was a scanned alleyway that I split up and created a fairly simple kit that could be swapped around as we needed. Here I also developed and environment shader that allowed us use world space coordinates to overlay dirt or grime over the top of the base texture allowing us more control over the scene and giving us more artistic freedom over the environment. This was important to achieve as scanned assets often have colour information and that can remove some of the creative freedom to bring an environment closer to our artistic scope. The shader is shown above and would allow masks to be used to blend height and normal information based on world space meaning texal density was kept across the scene as well as a proper blend to the materials.
The tileable materials were for a scene that recreated the streets of London and we needed variations that could be vertex painted to ensure tiling was hidden as well as building up focus areas of dirt and debris. I created a basic vertex paint shader in Unity and developed a few variations of asphalt and pavement that would tile and could be painted. We also used decals to add additional road markings and tyre tracks etc.
Finally there are some in engine renders of other scenes, mainly for Fire Investigation, where a shipping container is used to simulate a room and is set on fire allowing for investigations to occur in VR. We scanned the burnt room, and brough that into ZBrush, retopologise and add in engine. These are far more bespoke elements. The current rooms are empty due to licensing, but they would be populated with burnt assets that clients would use to test prospective investigators, creating an interactive testing experience where instructors could label the assets as evidence or points of interest. As these scenarios would only be loaded one at a time, it allowed us to better blend scanned and retopologised meshes to get as much detail and resolution as possible while still ensuring the scenes complied with memory budget for VR.
All these pieces and the shader work would become part of RiVR Arc, a sandbox VR training solution. It allowed users to tailor the training to their needs or to jump into directly to these more bespoke training modules. The shaders and materials were added to a library that users could access. With many of the areas being split into modular kits that allowed users to mix and match as they needed.
Rendered in real time in Unity
We also did a night time version of the scene adding emissive materials to the lights and a more moody lighting setup.
The environment material at work allowing us to add additional grunge and other details to better blend scanned and non scanned assets together.
The environment material shader
Alley scene assets breakdown
Alley original scan
Alley retopologised and ready for texture painting and engine.
Tileable materials created in Substance designer, these had to blend a scanned area with a normal road texture and have additional debris.
The scanned area can be seen here more due to the needs of the scene.
A simple pavement material created in designer
Pavement with debris
The material in designer
The baked version of the scan drives the intial setup
I amde a simple road material in designer that was more a basic asphalt road that could then be blended.
Masks were created for debris. I baked several debris textures based on the orginal scan and created masks that could be used in designer to add extra detail.
A very simple road setup, basic asphalt given some additional parameters that we could tweak later if needed.
Due to the nature of the scene, only small areas can be shown, this is the initial blockout showingf the scanned area being combined with a blockout that would later be a specific area of London.
We extended the area so that in VR it had scale and range that immersed the user.
Wireframe of the blockout, the road and scanned retopo area did not change.
The pavement material applied
The main scan area. The original scan was not asphalt, it was a concrete gorund that a violent simulation occured that we then scanned, I cannot show more than what is here, however this shows how the blended materials ended up looking on the actual mesh
Vertex paint shader in Unity to add more detail.
Fire Investigation rooms
I was also tasked with adding collision, some times these would be meshes created to fit a particualr object, or more simplified collision in engine depending on need.
The originally scanned room
The room now retopologised.
The final room in engine
Despite not being used for these particular scenes, I also created a basic foliage shader that allowed for SSS and wind.
