Back when I was an Art Director at a creative agency we were, for some reason, creating a lot of those cringe-worthy studio video tours the clients apparently love. Because I was a little obsessed with VR at the time, I couldn’t help thinking it would be the perfect medium for this kind of thing. [Plus, with VR being a hot topic at the time, having a free app on the App Store would only serve to boost the company’s image]
The company initially showed no interest in any of my VR ideas, so I decided to get started on my own. This involved staying late to photograph and measure up the entire office, gaining textures where necessary to add some realism without excessive modelling. Then back home I would re-create it, using Cinema4D, import it into Unity and use the Unity Remote App to view the editor live through the iPhone.
Models
Furnishing the place
As I wanted this to work on mobile (specifically the iPhone 4s, which I had at the time) I needed to ensure the models weren’t too detailed to improve performance. Unfortunately, a lot of the pre-built assets I found had a rather high poly count. So, as it seemed like a fun project, I decided to build a lot of the equipment myself from scratch.
Fortunately, a lot of the equipment were Apple products (it was a design studio, after all!), so there were high res photos from every angle (square-on, too!)
And as most of the furniture was from Ikea, it was either pretty simple to build, or else was available on the SketchUp 3D Warehouse site [a free resource for SketchUP users that, for some reason, is FULL of Ikea furniture!].
Response
Just when I was getting somewhere…
When I showed it to the company directors they immediately wanted to show it off and tasked me to build it into an app. Unfortunately I had to do this in my downtime and up until then I hadn’t even touched Xcode and had only navigated via the standard first person controller built into Unity.
I left the company shortly after and so the project was shelved.