Barbershop Simulator VR was developed with the intent that it could be used as an educational tool to teach people how to cut hair. This game provides the player with a creative and fun experience simulating cutting hair in a barbershop. In this prototype the player can use the razor and hair trimmer to cut and style the client’s hair anyway they want. The prototype version was present at the iLRN (Immersive Learning Research Network) 2020 conference.
My contributions:
- 3D modeled all assets in Maya
- Textured all 3D assets in Substance Painter
- Contributed to the overall design of the game
- Created paper prototype
- Presented game at iLRN 2020
Project goals:
- Create an interactive world where people could be creative and create cool hair styles
- Create a realistic tool that could be used for learning
- Develop 3D modeling skills
- Create an interesting virtual reality experience
Biggest Challenges:
- Modeling an anatomically correct human face
- Time and Scope
- Scoring the player
- COVID-19
- iLRN 2020 Conference Presentation
The process:
We started with an early version of the idea that one of the teammates had made on a LEAP motion project and we wanted to adapt it for an Oculus. The team came up with a simple design we wanted for the game to look like with just the barber and the client and you can move around the barbershop a little bit. One of the big challenges we faced was figuring out how to score the player. The idea the team wanted to achieve would be that we would try and compare what you cut to a picture of a grid and score the player based off that. Being that this project never got out of the prototype stage the score system never made it in. Modeling the head itself was a big learning process. I started modeling the head in my game art class and had some help from the professor to get me started. After that I spent some time watching videos on how to model facial features like the nose, mouth, and eyes. I also had to model the hair for the head model which was also intimidating because I have heard that modeling hair can be a very advanced skill. At first I just used cylinders to represent strands of hair so we could have something in the game for testing. Through research I eventually learned how to use Xgen in Maya to generate and model/style the hair the player. Unfortunately, the hair was too thin and hard to see in the game and we did not have time to fix it so the team used the older version. Working in VR was a new medium for most of the team members and there was a few of technical issues setting up the Oculus. Also, because of programming issues getting all the features we wanted into this game never happened and some of the updated models never made it into the game.
Click the link to view the itch.io page: https://kene991.itch.io/barbershop-simulator-vr
Click here to see our video submission to the iLRN 2020 conference: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y1BerWEP57Y&feature=youtu.be
To the right are renders of the models I made that are in the game:
