When we set out to make MINIMUM MASS we knew we wanted to aim for a photorealistic aesthetic. This was partially driven by the experience our team brings to the project—we’re mostly coming from film backgrounds. But it was also driven by a desire to see something gritty and cinematic in VR, and the belief that the story material demands a photographic image quality.

I turned to the work of American photographers Todd Hido and Stephen Shore. Both these artists have explored suburban life in unique ways. Todd Hido’s photos are mostly taken at night. The world he depicts is weathered in a way that feels lived-in but not dystopian. There is a noir quality, but none of the tropes we are most familiar with—it’s naturalistic noir instead of a caricature of a noir world. From a technical stance, the single source lighting, emphasis on shadows and atmospheric haze feel achievable.

Stephen Shore’s photos, which date from an earlier period, mostly the 1970s, are an excellent exploration of the color, materiality, and shape language of the objects that occupy the suburban world I want for MINIMUM MASS. My experience of growing up in the 90s was that most of the houses I lived in and visited had a kind of 70s hangover. So while MINIMUM MASS is set in contemporary New Zealand, I want it to have that feeling of “the recent past” but not quite “period.”

After watching Tilmann Milde’s Unreal 4 Lighting Academy tutorials, I did a closer analysis of what’s happening in Hido and Shore’s images in terms of color, brightness, and saturation. As Milde points out, the biggest challenge to capturing a look is to make sure the materials and shaders are set up correctly to begin with so the color values are properly baked into the environment.

Below, I sampled the color values of a selection of Hido and Shore’s images in Photoshop. Hido’s images tend to sit at saturation values between 20-60 with brightness bracketed more tightly between 40-60. These are average values but they indicate his images are moderately saturated and not very bright (except for the pops of source light in windows and lamps). Shore’s images have similar hues and saturation levels, though they tend to be a little brighter.

I then sampled the base values of the materials I’ve been using to prototype my environments. Some of the values are in the ballpark, but they are not consistent. I see now that I’ll need to bring down the brightness and saturation by 10-15 percent in many materials. Also, pure white is a problem. It doesn’t appear in Hido and Shore’s images at all, which makes sense given the overall weathered quality of objects.

Analyzing color values across reference art and current Unreal material base colors.

The screen grab and cinematic renders below are a first pass using the above base colors for living room and bathroom environments. Our next step will be to bring them in line with the reference art work and to paint more detail into some of the textures—particularly large surfaces like walls, ceilings, and floors—to create the feeling that this is a lived-in world.

Blocking in lighting, layout, and rough motion capture.

As a VFX Lighter who’s worked mostly on big budget feature films, my understanding of look development, cinematography, and lighting is shaped by a particular aesthetic and tool set. In feature film, especially for live-action franchise films, there’s always an emphasis on character beauty lighting which arises from the tradition of Renaissance portraiture. Even in shots which showcase complex and spectacular environments, the storytelling privileges how characters fit into that world. The world always says something about the character. In interactive storytelling, this relationship must often be inverted. The world is privileged, and characters are a reflection of it. Our interaction mechanic in MINIMUM MASS, the diorama effect, which allows a participant to scale and manipulate the environment so it fits into the palm of their hand, means the way I learned to light human faces—almost exclusively for the cinematic closeup—necessitates a change in approach to lighting.

Additionally, the tools of VFX lighting have become so sophisticated in recent years that there is little to limit the imagination. Raytracing, shaders, and physically based rendering technology enable incredible levels realism. And while real-time rendering continues to advance towards this established metric for realism, it is not yet there. More importantly, real-time in VR is even further behind game applications because the demands of stereo rendering mean the render is even more resource intensive. In other worlds, each image is rendered twice which means we can do half as much with it.

This is why focusing on the materials and textures will be the most efficient way to achieve the look of this world. So while volumetric lighting to create atmosphere and texture is technically pretty straight forward in Unreal, it’s going to be a huge challenge for the 90 frames per second target the Oculus Rift CV1 demands. Stay tuned for more…

Art Direction Look Dev