While creating an interactive experience of an apartment interior, it takes an artist 3-4 hours to assign materials to different surfaces inside an apartment, check for errors and create different furniture sets.
So we developed our Rigging Tool to help artists do this faster.
The entire process of rigging without the help of tools was done by directly applying tags to each mesh in each apartment. An entire apartment rigged by this manual process would take 3-4 hours, which now with the help of our Rigging tools have been cut down to roughly 20 minutes per apartment, resulting in a whopping 900% reduction of time spent doing this task.
All of the functional elements of our solution were very dependent on the existence of this tool. This tool allowed the designers to easily visualize the apartments to easily assign materials, identify rooms in the final UI seen by the end user, and allow additional materials to be applied when the user wants to see the unfurnished apartment materials.
This widget/tool was used to tag each floor, wall, ceiling, and skirting of each room, all with visual feedback to the person using the tool preventing any mistakes while working on something which required a very sincere eye.
The user would first select which apartment this is from the list of apartments fetched from the database as shown below, after which the rooms of that apartment would populate in a dropdown below:
After clicking on “Assign Apartment”, the entire apartment would be colored in red of all the meshes that would require tagging. This is done by utilizing the naming convention used in our system for every mesh.
These meshes will then need to be assigned as a room using the “Assign Room” button and selecting the room from the dropdown, which would then turn the color from red to yellow for this mesh
These meshes would then require to be tagged to identify if it is a floor or wall or ceiling or skirting using these materials:
When these materials are applied, the rigging process is complete. A fully rigged apartment would look something like this while the tool is open:
After assigning all the floors, walls and ceilings of every room, clicking on the “Assign Surface Tag(s)” will make all the existing assigned meshes tagged according to its visual representation shown above. This eventually helps when the user is in play mode and it properly reflects on the UI which room the user is in as shown below:
This also further enables the default finish materials and fully furnished materials to show as per the client’s demand for each room which is done with the help of another complicated tool used by our unreal engine developers to assign materials for each room and each element of that room e.g. floor, wall, etc.