Ruelle
Ruelle is a small VR walking simulator with an old school horror style. You're a new investigator exploring an alley of London. This project was an assignment during my bachelor and a technical challenge. The result had to be linked or projected to an architecture. It was at the same time that the COVID-19 started in North America. I decided then to make a VR experiment inside my very own apartment. The path of the map is in fact the corridor and some rooms of my apartment at that time. The goal was to walk in the apartment with a Rift-S headset connected to an HP-backpack computer.
In terms of art direction, I was inspired by the novel ''From Hell'' by Alan Moore & Eddie Campbell and I wanted to bring some element of the graphic novel in the project.
Ruelle was made in Unreal Engine 4. Most objects came from the Megascan library.
I went with the black and white style to bring the classic horror and also for the first step towards the comic style.
The post process helps to bring the comics with the classic highlights. I also used it as a security measure helping us to see correctly if you pass a corner or a real object, since the experience is meant to be played in a 0,8m (2,6ft) wide hallway.
The post process came from a classic cartoon shader. Each object seen by the player would have the white highlight. The highlight would show the environment out of the lantern light. I used the depth mask to limit the distance how far the player could see the highlights. The lights are also reduced to two levels of brightness.
The dissolve effect was my Blueprint challenge for this project. I wanted to bring a dark and ghostly effect like if the environment was temporary. The blueprint directly effects the texture of the asset. The texture have a falloff searching the Blueprint Volume. The Blueprint asset is simply a cube.
The layout was hard to work with in term of technical problem with the VR. The corridor brings already a maze like aspect to the project. It was easy to create a dark alley with these hallways. The white layout is the walkable area and the layout of the apartment.
Other asset / add-on :
-Blood: Additional Footprints And Trails - Underground Workshop Corp
-Blueprint: Victorian House Builder - Aevoke Studios
-Modular Victorian Interior Mansion - Simviz.net