ToTVR
I created an environment of the Tower of Terror queue experience for VR. I have always been a huge fan of the Tower of Terror and the storytelling in the queue, and I thought 3D modeling the environment and making it into a VR experience would be a fun challenge.
Modeling
I started by modeling the environment itself in Blender. I looked at reference photos of the interior of the rooms I wanted to create and built out the architecture of the room first. After creating the structure of the rooms, I went on to model all the assets, including lamps, vases, desks, curtains, and other items visible in the rooms. As I was modeling, I had to keep in mind that these were to be rendered in real time for the VR experience, so I built them with as little vertices as possible.
Texturing
I UV unwrapped every asset in the scene, and found a different texture for almost each one. Fortunately I was able to reuse some, such as the textures on the walls in each room. Some textures I wasn’t able to find a good picture for, such as the ceiling in the lobby, so I created them myself. The lobby ceiling was a pattern that I painted in Krita and unwrapped each ceiling tile to fit this texture.
Unity
After importing the scene into Unity, I reassigned each texture to a material and dragged them onto their corresponding asset. When it came to VR compatibility, I took to Unity’s documentation to do research. I installed SteamVR in the scene so it would run on an HTC Vive headset, and then I was able to manipulate the camera so it was placed where I think guests would stand. I then used scripts for the controller input and teleportation that allowed the user to move and look around.
I ran into a few issues here, mainly with the VR headset. I tried a few different headsets that our university’s library loaned out, but neither the library’s computers nor my laptop were strong enough to support the headset. I tried 3 different headsets, and it finally worked on an HTC Vive that my friend’s desktop computer was able to support.
Updates
I really enjoyed this project, so I wanted to continue working on it and add more assets to populate the lobby (my favorite room!). I started with updating the center table, where I sculpted details on the panels and remodeled the legs to add the proper detail. I’m in the process of updating this project, so check back later for more!
