Story Design - VFX & Atmospheric Additions

This week for our VR environment, I wanted to work on adding some VFX atmosphere elements.

Before adding particles, I wanted to refine further the nav mesh system. While our map would allow for teleportation freely in some areas, there were still some inconsistencies, once the user hit our doorway from the vestibule. After looking into the navmesh, I found that the mesh pathing was being interrupted by some collision hitbox.

Ideally the navMesh (green path) would be connected as a single shape. Here we can see this path has been broken apart into a few pieces. After clicking around to surrounding objects, I located the wall that had a bounding box crossing that section of the navMesh. I then went into the navMesh and changed it's collision hitbox to match the exact geometry of the objects.

Going through the map, changing collision hitboxes to match the geometry of the assets themselves, I reduced the influence of environmental geometry on the nav mesh and allowed users to freely teleport throughout the map without glitching into a step-style movement system where the user can only teleport a few inches in front of them.

With the nav mesh more reliable, I wanted to add some atmospheric particle effects. I started by dispersing transparent dust particles throughout the map. I also added a light atmospheric height fog, to imply a bit of distance, and fits our aesthetic as our greenhouse is towards the top of a tower.

One more element I wanted to add was a "Godray" of sunlight coming from our directional light source. Using a transparent mesh with animated texture, this ray will help highlight our hog body in the scene as the source of interest.