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A-Reality VR - Mixer and Gear Design
Project Description: A-Reality VR is an in-development hands-on companion app that augments the learning material found on the company's web platform. A-Reality has partnered with leading electronic music artists who want to teach music courses on the web and in VR. I was the artist on A-Reality's VR dev team who helped create a fully functioning 8-channel mixer, four effects units, and a real time frequency analyzer. Check it out on App Lab!
Responsible for: Designing visual appearance of mixer and gear, modeling, UVing, texturing, lighting, shaders (VU meters, and frequency analyzer bars), and graphics optimization.
Challenges: Creating the mixer/gear so that the dials, faders, and buttons were spaced far enough apart to be used comfortably in VR, but not so far apart that it made the overall mixer/gear too large, designing a sleek and professional look for the mixer/gear.
Software: Maya, Substance Painter, Unity (standard render pipeline), Figma
Responsible for: Designing visual appearance of mixer and gear, modeling, UVing, texturing, lighting, shaders (VU meters, and frequency analyzer bars), and graphics optimization.
Challenges: Creating the mixer/gear so that the dials, faders, and buttons were spaced far enough apart to be used comfortably in VR, but not so far apart that it made the overall mixer/gear too large, designing a sleek and professional look for the mixer/gear.
Software: Maya, Substance Painter, Unity (standard render pipeline), Figma
Lighting and rendering done in Unity.
An early 2D layout for the mixer.
Notes and edits to the layout from a meeting with music producer and DJ Oliver Lieb.
Two more layout iterations based on feedback from A-Reality team and Oliver Lieb. Right was the final version.
While working on the layout I started to test the size and feel of the gear in VR.
Art exploration for the design of the dials on the mixer.
With a version of the dials, buttons, and faders in place, developer Brian Topp hooked up the mixer and gear to the audio backend and created prefabs so we could iterate quickly.
Sketches of designs for the final mixer and gear.
I then positioned and spaced the dials, buttons, and faders to match the mixer layout, my designs, and to feel ergonomic/useable in VR. I exported the stand-in mixer body and created the final version based off of it.
The final step was to add as much of the static detail to the texture as possible (any text or tick marks etc.).