GOOGLE DAYDREAM
DAYDREAM HOMEWORLD
Concept design, Art direction, 3d environment design and outsource management
Google Daydream Homeworld
I was offered the chance to design environments for the Daydream View launch. It was a fantastic opportunity to work from a blank slate and lead a design effort for a Google launch product. Initially I explored how a simple 'papercraft' look could be worked into an VR environment thinking the lack of saturated color would help pop the UI elements, this eventually developed into a low poly aesthetic which evolved from taking photographic scenes and distilling them down into simple polygonal shapes but retaining the photo real lighting. The original intent was that over time, we would provide several different environments for users to choose from.
Due to time and resources we settled on two initial environments, the primary forest homeworld and a cave serving as the background for the Google Play Store in VR
I supervised the modeling of the scenes with an internal contractor and an external vendor. All the texturing and lighting was done internally with initial testing of placement and depth in VR using Omni Directional Stereo renders (ODS renders) from Maya using the Vray renderer. I took care to place scene objects so they would not clash with the UI or clutter the scenes. From those initial stereo renders we moved to exporting the full 3d scene to Google's internal 3d engine, Lullaby. The decision to go realtime 3d was influenced by both our desire to add some animated elements and the fact the 3d mesh rendered faster than the 4k ODS render.
However Google's engine at that time didn't support any lighting so I came up with a solution using techniques learnt from my time in visual effects. Using a cubic map of the environment, we 'projected' this back onto the low poly mesh using a custom shader. This gave us the quality and detail of the Vray GI rendered environment but with less texture overhead. we then added animated touches like flying birds that circle around the trees and moving water textures for the stream and waterfalls in both the Homeworld and Google Play Cavern. I also asked for a specialized layered shader so I could layer the GI and direct lighting passes back onto these moving textures to help them feel more believable.
Other animated elements included the gem particles in the Cavern (there was no particle system so these were animated by hand) and dust motes in the light rays (simple layered scrolling texture).
The Engineering team added a slight neck model to give the impression of being able to look around the scene a little, this revealed our projection gag a little bit so I had to bake some closeup meshes in the render into a texture atlas
I was really excited about the potential to add additional environments and put together a plan to build more after launch, even going as far as to create a nighttime version of homeworld. Unfortunately due to time constraints and shifting priorities, these ideas never got into production.
DARIN HILTON
San Francisco, CA,
darinhilton@mail.com