Fast Environment Modelling in Blender for Unity & Meta Quest
As part of a project I was required to recreate a real world environment in Blender for use on the Meta Quest platform. The timescale for this project was short and the model needed to resemble the clients real office whilst still being optimised enough for a mobile platform. In order to fit the work into the timeframe I approached this challenge with the idea of using images of the objects in the real world as textures and objects in the virtual environment. The main things I wanted to avoid having to make were decorational objects and props from the office I was trying to recreate. These included things such as framed certificates, posters, signage and awards. These are objects that would have taken much longer to model, unwrap and recreate the textures for which would’ve taken us way over the time allotted for the project.
I started by visiting the site and taking photos of every small object that I could find that would help create the feeling of their actual office environment. I then took some 360 Photos of the office space so I had some reference material for recreating the room and larger assets.
Reference Image - Reception
This is a 360 Image that I captured using a Insta360 Camera during a site visit.
Render - Reception Area
This is a render directly from blender using just the Emission from the ceiling lights and some sun from outside the main door. Almost all of the extra objects in this room are made using the image technique and are all on a singular texture atlas. Some of the items for example are the safe, wall boards, signs, frames and all of the awards.
The textures used on everything else where possible were either tillable textures or there were multiple objects on one texture set. Tillable materials were preferable as they were reusable throughout the project which meant we could use fewer materials overall. Any textures not on the atlas were created using Substance Painter with a combination of the substance materials and custom textures.
Main Room Location 1- Reference Pictures
Main Room Location 1- Render
This room was quite a mammoth task as it was pretty huge and had lots of different areas which needed to be accessible to the VR user. These included a Kitchen, Upper Mezzanine Area, Seating Area and it needed to lead into the reception area from above. This made the task pretty large and it needed to be created in a short space of time. This mean some limitations and reductions from the reference photo. I tried to keep the as many elements as possible and worked to make sure the environment gave the feeling of the actual space even though there were some missing features. I used the same photograph techniques for this room as I did in the reception area in order to quickly get objects such as the posters, signs and wall art.
The rendering was done in blender just using Emission from the ceiling lights and no other light sources.
Main Room Location 2 -Reference Photo
Main Room Location 2 - Render
If I had more time to work on this I would’ve spent more time adding some extra flourishes to add the small details to lots of the large objects such as the concrete pillars. It would’ve been nice if I could’ve added lots of the decals which were on the floor but these werent required by the client and there wasn’t enough time to create them. Overall I was pretty happy with the results given the time frame this was modelled and textured in.
