Role
Level Designer
1+ years
Platform
VIVE Pro Eye, Windows
Engine
Unity
Info
Training Tool
First Person VR
Driving Simulator
Release
Not publicly released
Key Contributions
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3D level & environment design
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Environment Art
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3D modeling
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PBR texturing
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QA testing
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Third party asset optimization
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Client & tradeshow technical demos
Level Design for Realism
Designing for IRIS was uniquely challenging as all road infrastructure had to be exact to the provincial and national standards used for real road construction. I often found myself referencing publicly available official government documents and engineering guidelines for road construction and regulations. These documents by nature were meticulously detailed, however upon studying them allowed me to create very realistic road layouts in 3D. I had to continuously reference the correct distances, widths and angles certain roads were required to have for everything form a single lane country road to a 4 lane stretch of highway. Furthermore, I was able to accurately populate these levels with the correct regulatory structures such as signages, railway crossings, guard rails, lane lines, and more.
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While I was given creative liberty to create unique level layouts, I often needed to capture the feel of an area, and in some cases I was tasked with producing accurate recreations of key roads or landmarks. For example, one such task was an accurate recreation of the Burlington Bay James N. Allan Skyway located in Burlington, Ontario Canada. As well as the surrounding stretches of road with multiple complex on/ off ramp structures as indicative of that industrial area. Furthermore, I had the opportunity to work on a wide range of environment styles. From dense urban cities based on Southern Ontario to winding mountainous roads based on Western British Columbia.
3D Prop & Environment Art
With the specific nature of IRIS, I often needed to create custom assets to fully realize my design vision. I created a wide variety of assets from roads & bridges, to vegetation, clutter props, and buildings. Each asset was created from the ground up, as I was responsible for all steps in the creation process. As such, I spent extensive time producing both high and low poly hard surface models, generating clean LOD's, making efficient UV layouts, creating PBR texture maps and baking textures, tiling textures, as well as importing and setting up everything in-engine as prefabs. Additionally, I spent a great deal of time working with Unity's terrain system to create idyllic landscapes. Each painted in detail with the terrain systems splat map texture painting, and prop/ vegetation population tools.
Another unique tool I used was EasyRoads3D Pro V3. This spline based mesh generator allowed my to quickly and cleanly create road networks and populate them with relevant props, such as street lamps or guard rails.
Working with Real World Topographical Data
One of the more interesting solutions I employed for creating levels was using real world topographical data to generate terrain height maps. For projects that required the inclusion of very specific terrain styles or landmarks, this was essential for capturing realism in my levels. I utilized a public tool called terrain.party which was originally created to generate maps for the game Cities: Skylines. This tool allowed me to specify a section of terrain on a global map, and generate a height map of it based on topographical data gathered from satellites, which has been made public via Google Maps. With some minor tweaking to the color values of the generated map, I was able to plug it into Unity's terrain system, adjusting values as needed, to produce a spot on recreation in-engine.