19 Million Polygons! A Theme Park Entirely in VR

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This article is part of a series focusing on the 3D industry in India. Read more here.

Meet Aditya Tuknait

Sunovatech is a company specialising in Virtual Reality solutions, software development, mobile applications, game asset development and gamification for the infrastructure industry. The company provides VR and animation services using technologically superior processes.

Aditya Tuknait, Production Director in Sunovatech India, gives us insight on a few of their biggest VR projects.

Sunovatech’s website

Our studio is in Kirti Nagar, New Delhi. 104 artists currently work with us. 

Our projects focus on 3D infrastructure visualization: we visualize proposed scenarios of urban development. They can be architectural, public transportation, urban planning, landscaping, and other infrastructure. We have delivered more than 600 visualizations worldwide. 

Animation and gaming is one of the fastest-growing markets in India. With 4G connectivity, digital media is available 24/7, whether it is animation, movies, or gaming. 

I started my career in the year 2000, and since that time I have seen exponential growth in the animation industry. In the early days, we were very dependent on others to teach us the skills to learn modeling, texturing, and animation – or we had to dig deep on the web to find some tutorials.

This is not the case anymore; anybody can be a fantastic artist if they have the dedication. There are millions of videos on YouTube that can help you learn anything. People are making planes and helicopters in their backyard, with the help of YouTube videos!

In the coming 5 years, I expect virtual reality will be the next big revolution in the entertainment sector. I believe we will meet and greet one another in the immersive world.

India has a considerable talent pool, but it is not Hollywood-ready. We need animation colleges here in India like VFS, Gnomon, Sheridan – just to name a few. Industry experts from the West should visit India and share their technical and creative experiences with the students here. 

Also, Bollywood should invest more in large budget animation movies to achieve creative satisfaction; this will boost the sector. As it is, many art colleges in India have introduced animation as part of their course, but still it needs to be advanced enough to meet the challenging demands of this industry.

Read more about 3D education in India here.

The Doha Oasis Theme Park in Qatar

The Doha Oasis theme park is a 30,000 m2 (322,917 sq ft) area, currently under construction in Doha, Qatar. We have created the entire theme park in Virtual Reality. The investors of the theme park wanted to see the park in full, and wanted to experience the rides of the park in VR way before its opening (soon, according to the Qatar Tribune).

Courtesy of Sunovatech

The entire VR projects have been modeled in 3ds Max and textured using Substance Painter. For this project, we were highly dependent on the Substance Source online material library. We have created approximately 1,334 models with over 1,800 textures and materials. The total polycount of the entire park was 19,122,358

We faced many challenges during production, as we had limited information about the design. The main requirement was to show the full rides in VR. That made our job delicate, as every extra polygon, texture, or materials will affect the frame rate. We needed to maintain a minimum of 60fps in VR, with excellent lighting quality and dynamic crowd simulation animation.

I was blown away with the simplicity of creating procedural materials and textures in Substance, which work so smoothly with any game engine like Unity or Unreal Engine. The main advantage of using Substance in production is the speed of procedural texturing and utilizing the mega material library of Substance Source. We use Substance Painter’s smart masks and generators for all our texture generation.  

The apartment VR tour

The apartment is a fully furnished house, with all the details one can imagine putting in a VR immersive experience. The most complicated item to do was definitely furniture. All the fabric textures of the sofas and beds were textured, and all the wooden furniture was done, using Substance Painter.

Wood is a very complex texture, and in furniture it flows on the geometry and design. But with Substance Painter, we don’t have to worry about UV seams or how to make the wood tiling match the furniture design. With Substance Painter, we quickly created multiple texture options for most of our furniture and other decorative items. 

Not to forget, we have the flexibility to change the scale of texture pattern with a button. This is an impressive feature. 

Specificities of Working in VR

Keep the poly count minimal, let your texture do the heavy loading. You can add significant details on the normal map and other fine details on the diffuse map. Keep your number of materials to a minimum per asset – I would suggest up to a maximum of 3.

The combination of polycount, number of textures and materials affects the framerate. Also, it is important to note that a VR headset gives less frame rate than standard real-time rendering.  

As we further move in our VR projects and push the quality level even higher, I am sure that our 50% of production will be carried out using Substance products. I am very excited about hearing what new developments Adobe brings for VR projects using Unity or Unreal engine. 

Read more about 3D in India here.

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