Roomful Assets
I was hired as a 3D artist to produce graphical assets for the on-line social platform Roomful. This platform has the unique characteristic of allowing users to create their own rooms, their own spaces, that they can then decorate as they wish.
The specificity of the project meant that the creation of the assets was highly constrained by technical requirements. First, we're dealing with mobile polygon counts and texture sizes, which both need to be kept to a minimum. Second, since all spaces are expansible and are dynamically populated by users, we cannot rely on precomputations like geometry or light baking. Finally, since all assets are downloaded on-demand, file download sizes need to be kept to a minimum for increased download speed and data saving - particularly important if there's no fast Wi-Fi available.
In order to create their spaces, users can kick-start the creation of rooms from one of the several styles at their disposal. I produced around 15 different styles of expansible rooms that users can mix and match to create their spaces, ranging from simple galleries to sumptuous baroque rooms, cozy living spaces to warehouses or medieval great halls.
Of course these spaces need to be decorated and populated. And in that sense, I have produced over 100 original objects, from furniture and picture frames to toys and party balloons.
All objects were highly optimized for mobile with LODs. Several objects support customization with user pictures or text, and some even have simple animations.
The amount of freedom the user has in Roomful to create rooms and decorate them with objects poses interesting technical challenges, particularly on the rooms.
Users can place any object almost anywhere in the floor or walls of a room. Also since users can create their own rooms and expand them with premade sections, I needed to ensure all of these sections fit together seamlessly. To keep file sizes small, all styles rely heavily on repeating textures and creative UV mapping, so at times this was rather tricky!
To keep the styles visually interesting I also needed to come up with strategies to render lighting effects that neither relied on light baking nor real-time lighting. For example, some lighting effects like shadows and highlights are actually accomplished with cheap overlapping planes.
