Walden & I

This VR project is inspired by The Rose & I, The Little Prince and also the book, Walden. I love reading this book. It is a reflection upon simple living in natural surroundings. I also want to create this kind of experience of self-reliance and voyage of spiritual discovery.

 

 

     2017.3

Virtual Reality, Game Design
Unreal, Blender, Notch
 
 
 
 

Gallery

 
 
 
 
 

Story

 
 

Inspiration

  • Walden – Henry David Thoreau
  • The Rose & I, The Little Prince
  • The Little Match-Girl

Keyword

Solitary, Self-Reliance, Discovery

Story

Winter has come, this little boy faces his first challenge that is to keep warm and survive in a cave nearby a lake. There are dry woods and leaves scattered in the forest. Can he discover them and make a campfire out of them?

As this is a voyage of spiritual discovery and a social experiment of self-reliance, there will be totally four seasons with different challenges for the boy to overcome in this remote forest. From winter, to spring, to summer and to fall, if he sucessfully survives he will probably establish friendship with animals, build his own wood house, harvest with abundant of food. Otherwise, he will just die lonelily and sadly.

     

    Moodboard

    Here is my moodboard for the feeling and landscape references. Click here to view on Pinterest

     

    Character Design

    I used blender for modeling and Cinema 4D for creating skeleton. 

     

    Motion Capture

    Here I used Notch to do some motion capture for the character.

    I also imported my model to Mixamo and got some great animation there.

     

    Landscape Design

     

    Particle System

     

    AI Navigation

    I wanted to have the little boy follow the player in VR, so I tried AI Navigation. Mixamo no longer provided the export for UE function, so I used blender to root bone my character and then tried to replace the third person character with my little boy. However, as the skeletons are still different I couldn’t map correctly. Next step I will try to create a new set of skeleton that matches the default third person character.