Experiment Oneiro

What is this project about?

Experiment Oneiro is an Unreal Engine 5 VR game project developed in the 2th period of my third year. In this project our group would make a game where you are trapped in an escape room, where the main objective is to escape. Our idea was that you'd be trapped in an escape room after you pressed an button. Each puzzle had their own element, we had 3 puzzles in total. You get a piece from an puzzle you must use for the next puzzle. You have 10 minutes to escape,

Project date: From November 2023 - February 2024

Project duration: 10 weeks, 3 days in each week.

Development Team: 19 people.

Engine: Unreal Engine 5.3

Programming language: Niagara stack simulation

My role & contribution in this project.

I was the VFX artist of this project, my role was to make multiple VFX for different teams while learning how to make the VFX. My contribution would make the final product look better in VR.

This was my first VFX I started making for the project. We wanted a gas that would enter our room, then we would use another gas vfx to make the room slowly appear with more gas. Before I started making this I used Unreal Engine documentation to make the lightning VFX above. Because I did that I was more familiar with Niagara.

In "Initialize particle" where we decice the size of our particle, below that we have "Shape location". With that we decide the shape of our particle, in this case we chose a sphere shape. In "Add velocity" we decide the particle's speed and in which shape it will be shooting. In this case we will shoot in the shape of a cone, so that the particle's will be a bit more spread out the longer the particle lives.

In "Particle state" it makes the particles die when they have reached the amount time they live. I have turned off "Gravity force" & "Drag" so that the particle appears more floaty, otherwise it will go down because of gravity. And finally in "Collision" it allows the particles to have collision with other gameObjects that have collision, because if the particle doesn't have collision they will phase through the object.

This is the gas VFX that would show up when the dream inducing gas has been activated. This gas would slowly become a gas cloud where you can hardly see through. After some time had passed you (the player) would be teleported to the game.

In "Initialize particle" is where I decide the size of our particle. In "Shape location" is where I decided to have the particles spawn in a round circle within a certain radius.

With "Wind force" & "Aerodynamic drag" we can make the particles move a small bit around like falling snow. With "Scale sprite size" the particles we each have a different size when they spawn, some big and others small.

This is the laser VFX, this will be used when your directing the laser at certain targets to get a puzzle key.

In "Spawn Beam" we spawn our beam, we get a flat white long 2D sprite. In "Shape location" is where I decided to have the particles spawn in a round circle within a certain radius.

In the sparkles_VFX in "Shape location" & "Add velocity" we decide in what shape the particles go shooting and in what direction. So we made it so that the particles shoot in a wide cone direction, so that it shoots in almos every direction. So when the laser beam hits something, the sparkles will be there at the end.

Gastube VFX, VFX that is inside the tube of the final puzzle.

For this VFX I used multiple emitters to get different variants of gasses, so they all have a different texture & material. I also used different speeds for the rest so that you that it's noticeable to see the difference and so that they're not all close together.

I've also turned the collision of for these ones, because the particles were glitching at the bottom of the tube where they spawn. By turning it off they simply phase through the bottom so that it's no longer noticeable that some of them spawn being stuck and glitching.

Retrospective

This was an interesting project, I like to try new things out since I don't know what my role or job is in the game industry. Making VFX seemed fun and interesting to do, so I chose that for this project. Although I'm not an artist, I liked what I made. I do think I would've wanted to make more diverse VFX, since lots of these were gas.

But this was my first time as well, so I think I did pretty good. I learned quite a lot, so maybe in the future I'll do a personal project where I'll focus more on the VFX and diversity. But I'm also interested in making a cinematic with Unreal Engine, so I'll do that first in the near future.