We are Studio Duat, a student team of five artists and two programmers at Carnegie Mellon’s Entertainment Technology Center.
This semester, we’ve been tasked with bringing the mythology of the Egyptian afterlife to life in Oculus and the CAVE.
A large portion of our week has been reworking the production package we were provided with from last semester’s team. It had been designed with a heavily technical team in mind, with limited art capabilities.
The myth takes the guest from a tomb through the Land of Night, the Land of Day, and ends in the Judgement Chamber. Hearts are weighed against a feather on a scale; if hearts are heavier than a feather by the wrongdoings performed in life, the heart and its owner are eaten by a monster, and if the hearts are lighter than a feather, the soul lives for eternity in an idyllic paradise. Given the composition of our team, we are searching for ways to exercise the considerable environmental art talent of our team while remaining true to this concept and story provided for us.
We’re in the process of:
- Developing concept art for each environment
- Building asset lists for each scene
- Developing test scenes in Unity
- Determine scale of our scenes and art assets
- Produce a 360 degree animatic to test timing of the guest experience
We recognize that bringing a narrative experience told across four distinct environments to life in two different platforms is an extremely ambitious goal, and we’re excited for the challenge.