VR Environment: Noir Rainstorm

I was always a huge fan of Sin City movies for their dark atmosphere and unique style

For a very long time I wanted to create a similar-stylized project, but in VR for full immersion

The environment you see was originally meant to be part of a much bigger world, with actual plot and detective gameplay, but it was too ambitious for a solo endeavor

I decided to finalize this scene as a proof of concept

It pushed me to research and master areas in content creation I previously had zero experience with

For the first time in my life I had to dive deeply into Adobe Audition and Unreal's audio scripting to make an immersive ambiance

I deeply enjoyed blending the sounds together and writing the logic behind their playback and modulation. I'll make sure to practice my sound design skills further and improve at it

The visual part of this environment heavily relies on visual effects, so a number of creative solutions had to be developed to make everything work smoothly in VR

For instance, I bundled together a relatively lightweight additive shader, faking volumetric lighting where possible. Had to play around with a lot of approaches to make it work as intended

Also I developed a simple, yet effective randomizer for the lightning strikes

And created a material system for puddles with ripple effects, optimized for VR

Another particular challenge was the sky

I decided to spend extra time researching how to make spectacular weather effects with Unreal's materials

After a lot of digging around, combining ideas from forums and Unreal's docs, optimizing the graph however I could, the result was definitely worth the trouble

In the end I'm extremely glad I took this journey to it's end

Hopefully one day I'm able to publish a full game in VR with this setting

Until then: a couple of remaining screenshots