Overview
"Darling" is a VR experience to my band's single, aptly called "Darling". If you'd like to listen to the full song, feel free to look up "No Man's Land" on Spotify. This project was made as a sort of... interactive film? Because I'm a die-hard game nerd I wanted to add in interactivity -- so there are buttons and prompts when you get close to certain areas/objects.
The project was made with help from my lovely flatmates / bandmates / mocap actors, Hannah and Paige. Shoutout to them!
You can see the progression from the storyboard to the final (first video). Quite interesting to watch back!
Probably my favorite part (and the hardest) was making the shatterable mannequins. To do this, I created a static mesh from the paused animation. In Unreal, there's an editor mode called "Fracture Mode", which contains a wide variety of tools for fracturing and editing. Most commonly this is used for destruction sequences -- e.g, a building blowing up / a bullet shattering. For this project, it was to destroy mannequins (or metaphorically, old memories).
In fracture mode, you can generate a 'fracture' pattern. When the player walked into the collision box of the mannequins, I added an impulse at their location and "destroyed" the actor.
Another favorite of this project was the car sequence. Admittedly, it was just a copy of the VR Pawn with a car mesh attached + some physics tweaks. Work smarter, not harder! I had to be super careful with lighting changes for this project too, and made sure to build after each layout tweak. This is because VR is basically a big fussy baby to build for.
I also made use of Unreal's 'game instance' for the first time. 'Game instance' is the only blueprint which persists through changing scenes. I used this to control the scene transitions alongside the music.
Overall, I learned a lot of skills for this project. It was a super involved experience. I used SHOGUN to first record the MOCAP, MOTION BUILDER to retarget + add in the models, and Unreal to add in the scene, layouts, and code.
