Immersed between Movies and Games — 🎬Within🎮
Some people might wonder how I got into this field, and we can’t talk about this without mentioning my previous company — Within. As early 2014, Aaron Koblin and Chris Milk founded Vrse which is very first frontier of the VR content creator at that moment. By the yeah 2016, the whole industry entered the VR hype era, the company raised another series funding and changed name to Within. And luckily, that’s exact the point when I joined the team as a 3D artist.
Just right after graduated from Gnomon School of VFX, not only to find the job in the US was an exciting challenge to me, and on top of that, this cutting-edge immersive field really pushed me into a total unknown territory. With this mindset, I started my first project with Within — Life of Us.
🌍Life of Us🌍
Life of Us is a multiplayer interactive application by experiencing all the evolutionary creatures on earth. From the single-celled Amoeba to the blowing-bubbles tadpole, and from little lizard chased by T-rex to Pterodactyl throwing fireball, then become the modern and civilized human. In the last part, you will be in a sci-fi world with a robot body and dancing with every creatures. The whole story is presented by the visual and audio form, it also leverages the hand controller, and the interaction from other players to deeper the experience. E.g., player can chat with each others via the microphone from the Vive headset, and the pitch will be twisted based on your current evolution stage. This really drives so many people screaming at their first experience, which is super hilarious noise during the show.
💪Made with Unity💪
It’s worthy to note that this project got the direct official support from Unity and provided us special early version Unity which was NOT even available on the Beta Download page then. Like the timeline feature, that’s a very intuitive and huge deal to us. Give the director to have more granular control of the storyline. They also came to our office to do some interview and behind the scene, and I still remembered we all are asked to clean up our own desk. I did wear a nice coat that day but it turn out none of my shot is in their final edit. Haha so sad🤣
🌉Working Progress🐟
During the progress, most of my tasks are creating the assets according to the concept art or style frame but sometimes there are also something don’t have super clear direction and allow me to play around. This cascading bridge reveal animation is one of example. In order to balance between performance and how it looks, I spent tons of time to try any feasible solution. In the last minute, I‘ve tried almost all my possible tricks and delivered. Surprisingly, still approved by my big boss, big relief!
Also for some of the fish animation, it’s generated by the crowd simulation system which provided an obstacle object to detect the dynamic swimming path. BTW, all the fish asset tasks were assigned to me but I’m not sure why?
Maybe my boss was thinking, he can definitely handle the job well because of his name!?
This project won tons of awards around the world including some big film festival like Sundance, SXSW, Tribeca and most of them were the first time to open this new VR category. Also, right in the beginning of the app, we put a tagline in the experience lobby, This is not a game… or a movie. In hindsight, you might take this for granted from today’s standard. However, you must understand that’s exactly the contribution of all the groundbreaking predecessors, and Within is part of it and deserve the credit.
And because of this, it became a meaningful turning point of my career that gave me a chance to think out of the box and go to another exciting world.
