VR interactive archviz - Loft apartment

Quick update:
We now have published a short preview video

We are very excited that we finally are able to share what we’ve worked on the past few weeks.
We were quite busy with one of our latest VR project – an interactive archviz VR walkthrough of a loft style apartment. The Project was publicly first introduced at Ligna(Deutsche Messe) and received quite positive feedback for the five days of presentation.

We started developing it for the Vive headset and beside the prepared PC (first person) version we now aim to port it for the PlayStation VR goggles as well.
The main purpose of the walk-through was to have a narrative, a story to be told.
We came up with a scenario which complimented the use of different interactive objects, i.e. some-thing to grab and through, different types of opening of interior and furniture doors, turning on appliances etc. For the proper scenario rundown, please scroll down to the bottom of the article.
The client for the project is coming from the furniture industry so the absolute accuracy of the furniture pieces and their fittings was a must. We spent quite a few hours perfecting the animation of the showcased hardware (wardrobe and kitchen top row mechanisms, all the hinges and sliding doors etc).
On the software side – for the furniture design we used a dedicated interior design software – imos. It can export the geometry with CAD precision which alongside being quite hard to manage was also a must.
For our main 3D needs we relied, as usual, to CINEMA 4D. After the preparation was done we prepared a quick lighting scenario, so we know what to aim for once inside of UE4.

Here is a short spec sheet:
• Lighting build on around 70 CPU cores. Took appx. 9 hours.
• Each of the scenes was roughly around 4,1 mil triangles – after the poly reduction in C4D
• Accurate collision geometry – created in CINEMA 4D – for every object that was meant to be grabbed.
• Developed and played on both GTX 1070 and 1080.

Here is how the story goes:
• our fictional character wakes up and throws the annoying alarm
• she puts on some music and gets a quick look inside the wardrobe
• goes down to the kitchen and grabs a morning cup of coffee
• while she tries to find sugar for it, she presents the different kitchen cabinet types
• then she goes to check the forecast showing another furniture door type and turning on the first appliance
• she then goes out on the terrace, so she can check the actual weather
• going back to the loft she steps into the home office area and presents the stand-up desk
• pressing the button wakes up the workstation and she is presented with a question
• that way she is able to completely swap the whole scene (materials, geometry and environ-ment)