Reflections of Iwanoff rebuilds a long-lost post-modern house designed by Iwan Iwanoff. Iwanoff was a Bulgarian avant-garde architect who operated in Australia from the early 1950s to the late 1980s. In Reflections of Iwanoff, you are guided on a personal tour by award-winning Australian architectural historian Stuart Harrison, on the tour you will learn about the principles of modernist architecture and then experience what living in the house would have been like.
The project used original floor plans supplied by the WA State Library and photographs and articles made available by the Harrison family.
The project was funded by The State Library of Western Australia, in partnership with Screenwest, as part of the WA Reflections initiative.
Reflections of Iwanoff is an interactive, VR experience I worked on in 2021. The initial project was created by a small team of students and recent graduates. Although the team did a great job in building the experience, I worked to rebuild the experience from the ground up to run at a performant level to be accepted into the Oculus AppLab store.
UPDATE: Reflections of Iwanoff is now available from the Oculus AppLab for free.
To do this I:
- Rebuilt the majority of 3D models at a lower polygon count whilst retaining the overall look of the original models.
- Textured the newly built 3D models, making sure to keep texel densities consistent across all models and making heavy use of tileable materials.
- Lit and light baked all objects.
- Created a simple ocean shader.
- Remodelled foliage to allow better performance (Particularly for Oculus Quest 1 headsets)
- Programmed a custom occlusion culling system.
- Programmed a custom VR interaction system for moving around the virtual house.
- Programmed an audio manager for playing back tour audio clips and background soundscape.
- Rebuilt image/video timeline in story mode.
Some images from the experience:
An image showing my custom culling system (Eg as a view moves from one of the cyan boxes into another area, objects that are not visible from that area are automagically turned off … I wrote my own system here because the default Unity occlusion system was not working well for this scene)
An image showing the light baking inside the lounge area:
