Skull Island is a new Jahshaka world created to showcase some of the new features in the Jahshaka 0.6.0 release, and we are pleased to release it now for immediate download.
The idea for skull island came about while looking for a way to push Jahshaka’s particle system to the limit, improve our water shader, and at the same time test a new material workflow from Substance Painter and Designer. We decided that building a tropical island scene would be perfect since we could create a waterfall along with a large body of water in a immersive environment.
A search was done online for ideas that could help us with the overall theme, such as pirate ships, treasures and tropical island scenes. Once we had enough images to guide us, the next step was to create individual 3D models that we could use to build our scene.
A base mesh was created for the each asset such as rocks, plants, skull, treasure chest, a boat, etc. this was done using blender 3d. low polygon count meshes were created then subdivided and then sculpted on to simulate rock texture. The high poly sculpts were then baked into normal information that was then used to project back onto the low poly meshes.
taken it into Substance Painter to be textured. Substance painter has the ability to paint directly onto the geometry and use multiple layers and masks. Several layers were used to generate a worn & aging look like moss growing on the objects & edge wear damage.
The models were then exported and brought into the Jahshaka Asset module for testing, and the materials were refined and the scene was optimized for VR. The optimization included removing unnecessary assets and reducing texture sizes to ensure we had a high frame rate.
The scene was then assembled in the Jahshaka editor, which consisted of adding all the different assets and lights for the glow in the skull, building the waterfall and adding the surrounding ocean and creating a skybox for a true island effect.
Particle Particle Particles
The greatest challenge we had was creating the waterfall. This meant working with the particle system to both create water that flowed downwards, and to create the mist effect of the waterfall hitting the ocean.
The waterfall was created using Jashaka’s particle system. The gravity was turned up the simulate the appearance of the water falling, an image texture with low opacity was uses for the water droplets. The foam effect was simulated by setting the gravity to zero and turning down the velocity. A light dispersed foam texture was used for the mist.
This then gave us our final scene. A viewer was added to enable VR playback and the enter scene was then optimized for VR to ensure high frame rates.
You can download Skull Island now by clicking the following link
That’s all for now with this scene. Go to our downloads section to view and download more virtual worlds, assets and materials. Keep updated with all things Jahshaka by visiting our website’s news section. And for more information on Jahshaka, you can follow us on Twitter @jahshakafx and like us on Facebook at Jahshakafx.