furality
patreon
F.Y.N.N.’s Room: The Creative Journey
🕑 Added 2022-04-08 15:00:08 +0000 UTCHi! I’m Hiyu, Art Director at Furality, I lead the world-building side of the Creative Team.
Before embarking on a full remake of F.Y.N.N.’s Room, we first needed to be certain that what we were making would be a big improvement. On day one, the team got together in a meeting and contributed to a mood board of reference images. Once we were happy with the general vibe we were aiming for, our Illustration Lead, Oku, got to drawing concepts of the room:
Some of the original concepts drawn by Oku at the start of the project.
Armed with the concepts, our world artist Ivaj created the layout of the room in its simplest form, known as a ‘blockout’ - after which, we all jumped into VR to understand the place better in-person. Over a week or so, we’d make edits to the layout, get in VR to test them, then make more edits - changing the proportion of different areas, adjusting the stairs, etc. (Starting with a blockout of the space allows us to make large, sweeping changes without worrying about lost effort, and to really nail down the scale and proportions of the project early.)
Next up was the process of creating the props. Similar to the room, these also start as simple coloured shapes, allowing us to place them and create compositions quickly before worrying about the details.
A screenshot of the world during the later part of the ‘blockout’ phase, while working on lighting.
While Ivaj was working on props, I tried my hand at programming a tool for the team:
The Propline tool, inspired by a tool at Hazelight Studios, lets you place props along a line with random scatter, rotation, and scale. While useful for placing the books in F.Y.N.N.’s Room, this tool will also be used to place coral and seagrass for Furality Aqua.
And Kreic, our avatar artist, got to work adapting F.Y.N.N.’s super-suit from Furality Legends to be displayed next to the Portal.
The Portal
Ivaj modeled & textured the Portal frame, and it ended up looking cool as hell. The Portal was part of the redesign from the very start, intended to be a very direct way of stepping into the worlds from past conventions. Everyone in the World Team had to be involved in its creation - Concept Art (Oku), 3D Modelling (Ivaj), Shaders (Naito), Udon Scripting (Texelsaur), Sound (Darelt), and myself for lighting. It ended up being an intricate web of scripting references across time and space - having to also do a lot of less-obvious duties, like toggling different audio sources on and off to manage the available audio channels (we only get so many!), or telling the dynamic music system in the Luma area to fade in and out.
One thing that’s very special about our portal is that you can see through to the other side - it’s like a window of sorts, distorting the view of the world beyond it. Behind this effect was our shader artist, Naito.
A shader is a bunch of math that runs on the graphics card. For every pixel on the screen where that shader is visible, this math needs to be run. Most of the time, the purpose of a shader is to take some existing data (surface angle, camera position, textures, etc) and use it in wacky ways to achieve a desired result.
For the Portal, Naito wanted to give the effect a ‘3D’ sense of depth. The first step is to take what the camera sees through the portal, and treat it as a texture. Next, figure out the angle between the surface and the player, and use that information to slide the texture by a certain amount - so, as the player walks around the portal, the texture slides around with them, showing an illusion of depth. Lastly, distort the texture (essentially, animate small portions of it to slide around randomly) to create the final portal effect (and also hide the fact that it’s just a flat texture!).
During playtesting with the wider Furality team, strange bugs were discovered where, under very specific circumstances, another player could walk through and convince the Portal to toggle the audio/music for everyone else. To this day, I still don’t know how many hours Texelsaur battled with Udon code to fix these issues, but it was probably a lot, so my hat is off to him. We got there in the end!
But it’s a Spaceship
Just like the previous version of the world, F.Y.N.N. lives aboard a spaceship.
We got to a point, less than a month before release, where we became very stuck with the aesthetic aspects of the room. While Darelt’s incredible sound design had given the room the aural ambiance it needed, the visuals were still a bit too plain, despite the work being done on props and lighting. It just didn’t look ‘spaceshippy’ enough.
It was around this time that Zillion joined the Illustration team, and was eager to work on concept art, so I sent him some screenshots of the room and tasked him with making them more spaceship-like. What he came up with was immensely helpful:
These concepts by Zillion informed the final look of F.Y.N.N.’s room, and can be found on F.Y.N.N.’s desk in the finished version. Note the frames around the shelves, the ceiling tiles, and the triangular details.
Legend City - The Furniture Store
Early on, we decided a completely new area was needed to represent Furality Legends - the original convention worlds were either too spacious, too purpose-built, or too far from the vibe we wanted. I envisioned this new area being an alleyway with a railway bridge above it, near to the park that was in the Legends lobby world - though it would still need a comfortable area for people to chill in, with furniture. I settled on the idea of a dusty, abandoned furniture store, repurposed by the villains into a temporary lair.
Ivaj designed a beautiful building material, as well as fire escapes with pawprint shapes within the railings.
We settled on an old CRT television to display the video player in this area. Ivaj worked on an excellent shader for the screen, which displays HD videos as if they were broadcast on an old shadow-mask TV. Even the audio is filtered to match.
My one fear with making a furniture store was that it would require a lot of new props, primarily chairs, tables, and lamps. I decided to make most of these within a single Blender project, making them relatively simple, and having them all share space on the same material (good for performance, and simplifies the texturing process).
The trick with making scenes look good overall is to not focus on any individual prop, but rather, focus on the quantity and variety of props - so you end up with a larger arsenal of props, allowing you to create more interesting compositions within the scene.
The Luma Forest - Bringing Back Memories
Before we even decided to remake F.Y.N.N.’s Room, we knew we wanted to bring back the Furality Luma Dealer’s Den world.
The two massive pink & blue trees (lovingly nicknamed Cotton & Candy by our team) became such an icon of that convention - there was no second thought about bringing them back in some way.
However, there were important aspects of Luma that were lacking from the Dealer’s Den island and were only present in the other Luma worlds - the Forest, the Windchime Trees, and even the Crystals. To truly represent Luma, these had to be added to the island. That, and without the Dens, the four large ground levels of the island had a lot of empty space. Daltyn (Creative Director) insisted that we find a way to reduce the size of the area, make the snaking path more tolerable, and include as many aspects of Luma as we could. I agreed.
An idea came to me that this floating island, held aloft by a huge crystal, might not always pull up the same amount of the ground whenever it decides to float up - that I could chop off the two lowest levels, and fill the remaining space with the missing theme elements. It worked, so I immediately got to work adding the Luma Forest to the island, optimising and polishing as I went.
Literally everything in this view is animated. Even the ground has its own custom shader that animates any light that falls on it - the red, green, and blue channels pulse independently.
While a good chunk of the Luma assets had their models and shaders updated, the one that received the biggest upgrade was the Windchime Tree, for which I made a whole new model. We wanted to recreate a scene from the very first Luma concept art that Oku drew, and for that, we needed new trees. Darelt also worked his magic in this area, adding his wonderful windchime and crystal sounds (which he even adjusted to work with the music).
This was also my first time programming a dynamic music system. I composed a small piece of intro music for this area, split into two tracks: an upper melody section, and a lower, suspenseful-sounding accompaniment - so that I could maintain suspense in the initial forest area, while being able to fade the melody out separately, so that it wouldn’t clash with the main Luma theme (The Wandering World) that starts playing when you round the corner. I love Wandering World - but to keep the full theme from repeating forever and getting old, once it finishes its first play, I made it switch over to a version that only plays the chords (the softer harmony in the ‘background’ of the song). I then wrote a system that fades the melody back in, based on how high-up the player has climbed to the lookout point at the top of the island, allowing them to still listen to the full song under the tree.
Fixing Problems
On our creative journey we encountered hundreds of strange bugs and behaviours, ranging from standard easily-fixable code mishaps, to inherent quirks of Unity Engine and how VRChat uses it. Audio issues, like only being allocated a certain number of audio channels (we can only have so many sounds playing at once, or bad things happen), or hearing stuttering when animating the volume of sounds. Collision problems that caused players to fall out of the world, even after adding extra colliders over everything (try jumping against the side of a certain mirror in the Legends area...). And the previously-mentioned networking issues Texelsaur had to debug with the Portal system (thanks again to everyone who tested!)
Fun fact: We use a Narga (model by Toastador) as our standard player height reference.
There were also some much weirder issues that took a while to fix...
In the Luma area, the crystal ‘campfire’ is surrounded by wooden logs, used as seats. The models for these logs kept disappearing from the project on a regular basis - their files would just be missing entirely. Gone, reduced to atoms.
What’s important to know is that we on the Creative Team use GitHub for collaboration. Git has this text file called ‘.gitignore’, which grants us the ability to list certain file names/file types that we don’t want to upload to the shared project: useful for cache files or other locally-generated files that don’t need to - or *shouldn’t -* be synced to other team members, like compiled shaders that are unique to each PC, or log files. *Log files...*
Git was removing our log models because they were in a folder called *Logs*.
(We just renamed the folder.)
Without going into too much detail, global politics also affected our project.
At Furality, we use a third-party plugin to pre-compute the lighting for our worlds, letting us use hardware raytracing and AI to quickly & accurately paint our world with light , while also improving performance for players. But we wouldn’t be able to release F.Y.N.N.’s Room in a state we were happy with unless a niche bug in this plugin was fixed - we were having issues getting the three areas, each with different lighting setups, to coexist. The sole developer of the plugin was usually very active on the Unity Forums, communicating with users and being incredibly helpful. We posted about our issue, and others mentioned they could reproduce it - but the dev was nowhere to be seen.
Two weeks later, he returned, saying that he had successfully escaped his home country. He wrote a blog post, voicing opinions he could only share now that he was out - then got right back to work. I can’t imagine what it was like for him during those two weeks, nor how he maintains such incredible, continuous dedication to his community.
Whew, that was a lot!
Thanks so much for reading! I hope this has given some insight into the wacky process of world creation. Furality Aqua is just a few months away - we’re already hard at work on it - and we can’t wait to share the Oceans of Luma with you all.
