Hi there! We are a team of grad students at the Florida Interactive Entertainment Academy from the University of Central Florida!
Last Fall, we were tasked with developing a VR experience based on a known IP. As many members of our team are Pokemon enthusiasts and/or love their design style, we went down that route for our project but with our own special twist to it. As more Pokemon games have been released, there has been an increased emphasis on making the Pokemon feel more alive and the world feel more immersive. For our VR experience, we wanted to pay tribute to the original Pokemon games but with more than just a modernized feel to them.
With the Pokemon Let’s Go art style and animations inspired by the anime as our aim, we are excited to share our spin to the beginning of the classic Pokemon journey featuring Professor Gary Oak as your mentor. You too are about to begin your adventure as a new Pokemon trainer, and what could be more important than picking your first ever Pokemon partner? With such a momentous event, our team believes that your choice for your first Pokemon buddy should feel authentic. We want our players to feel welcome to interact with all of the Pokemon available: Bulbasaur, Charmander, and Squirtle, and get to know each one of them. Each Pokemon has their own personality, and it’s a question of which one fits you! They might all act different but they’re all excited to get to know you! Feel free to pick each one up, pet them, play with them, etc.!
After all, you’re both getting to know one another for the first time!
And what else to better culminate this big decision than with a Pokemon battle with Gary Oak himself? What moves will you choose: Bubble, Ember, Razor Leaf? Choose the right moves and maybe you can win against the legend himself!
We truly aim to create a fun experience where people can feel really immersed in the Pokemon universe and to bring life to such a historic video game classic that many of us share beloved memories for.
Super thrilled you decided to share your journey here on the forums. I look forward to watching your project develop and seeing all the adorably vicious pokemon.
Hey Everyone! Gonna go ahead and introduce myself: I’m Nic Witthoeft and I’m one of the animators on Pokemon VR! I’m a graduate student studying at FIEA and am focusing on Story Based Animation and Cinematics.
Currently we are going through our rough first passes of animating the different Pokemon. Though even at these borderline proxy stages of animation we really wanted to push the appeal of everyone’s favorite pocket monsters.
I’m really excited to show everyone more progress as it comes along! We’ve got quite an animation workload for this project so they’ll be rough and fast to start but ultimately more polished and awesome as we go along.
You can find more of my stuff on my personal website or my twitter
Hi there! My name is but my pals call me Blue! (Not to be confused with Professor Blue!) I’m an animator and was recently welcomed into this project. I adore the Pokemon franchise so I’m very excited to begin animating! Linked below are the animations I’m working on currently. I can’t wait to help bring these cute little creatures (and Professor Blue) to life!
Hi everyone, it’s awesome to meet you all! I’m Roscoe Generato, though you can also call me Djako! I’m the project lead for the Pokemon VR experience and am super excited to share our progress over the next couple of months! By trade, I’m a 2D concept artist and illustrator, as well as a 3D character artist.
For this project, I’m designing the visual UI in the game that you will be interacting with and am the primary lighting artist! I’m also in charge of all the sound in game!
Here’s a preview of one of the UI that I worked on!
Hey everyone! My name is Laura Reyes and I’m a tech artist that recently joined the Pokemon VR team! I’m super excited to be a part of this team and help bring this experience to life!
For the moment, I am currently working on fixing the skin weights on the rig, but here’s a gif of the project I was working on before: Tangled VR! I mainly worked on the blueprint and functionality along with the pascal character model.
Hey all, I’m Parker Ibold, a tech artist and the programmer for this project. Almost all of the functionality you’ll see will have been done by me. In the coming weeks, I hope to have the experience fully working with the ability to play with the pokemon and even go into the most immersive pokemon battle ever!
Hello! I am West McCann, an animator for the Pokemon VR project! Originally I was on a smaller team working on a Tangled experience where we were going to create an interactable Pascal character, so I’m excited that my practice working on quadruped and bipedal creatures will be helpful to this team!
Hello, my name is Dasha Kudryasheva and I am a 3D character artist. For this project, I worked on creating the Pokemon and Professor Gary. Soon I’ll be working on texturing all of them and adding Squirtle.
Hi my name is Akshay Dodia , I am one of the 3D modelers working on this VR experience. I am responsible for the modeling and texturing some of the assets that are in the game experience.
These are some of the assets I was responsible for.
