The Objectives:

As mentioned above, a lot of inspiration for this set was taken from art deco skylines of the 1940’s as often depicted in the detective noir genre and media like Batman: The Animated Series. Performance was a high priority for this set to ensure effective rendering times as well as fluid camera movement throughout any scenes with no to minimal lagging effects. Taking advantage of XR as a medium to create a set exploring all possible dimensions was highly important as well, and using TouchDesigner to create interactive and triggerable elements to be utilized by a hypothetical director, actors, and crew.

This Virtual Production set is inspired by the quintessential skylines of 1940’s art deco cities, and was loosely based on my upcoming game design project Phantasma Arcane. Using a combination of Unreal Engine 5 and TouchDesigner, I created and rendered this set for display on the Miami University XR Stage housed in the McVey Data Science Building, hosted on a Disguise Media Server.

The Processes:

All of this set was created in Unreal Engine 5, with TouchDesigner being employed to create the interactive effects. Utilizing OSC techniques, the time of day can be controlled with the scroll of a mouse wheel from a controller laptop, and various stage effects (i.e. explosions, flying ships, etc) can be programmed in Unreal and then triggered from the laptop with specific keyboard input. The individual assets were curated from internet resources, particularly FAB and then assembled and kitbashed within Unreal. In order to ensure performance, minimal assets were actually used in the scene with alignment created using forced perspective to make the look for a full city. Emissive textures were utilized to light the skyline, eliminating the massive CPU power often associated with point lights. The rainfall effect was created utilizing a Niagara particle system within Unreal, the raindrops are rendered as white for performance and to make them visible against the skyline.