Creating content for virtual reality when your aspirations are set high can be a daunting task. In order to move beyond the low-poly small bitmap textured environments that have come to typify video game art for the past couple of decades, the small indie team must focus on mastering a wide number of tools. The principles of this creativity are the same as they are for Triple-A titles, but instead of 300 people creating the world, you might only be one or two.

Since this past summer, a lot has changed as the game industry undergoes an amazing evolutionary convulsion. What stands out is the fact that hardware, software, and competition from the indies are at a critical stage of altering the business model and show no sign of letting up. The convergence of GPU rendering power, high-quality mobile display tech (the backbone of the VR headset), procedural and physically based textures, the Steam network, and various other platforms for content distribution, along with the myriad advancements in general PC hardware such as inexpensive ram and fast SSD’s that allow us to run Blender, Unreal, Substance Designer, Photoshop, and DayZ all simultaneously are giving the individual an incredible amount of leverage.

With this power and opportunity, I’m facing steep learning curves every single day. At first, I struggled with simply learning how to make seamless textures. Then, the long, slow arch of learning UV unwrapping showed up like Godzilla to crush my ideas that I would just throw these materials on my meshes. Because I’m looking to bring these skills to work with Unreal Development Kit (UDK), I was only focused on low-poly meshes. I had no game-creating experience, and so as I understood things, I needed to be super conservative with the geometry and size of materials.

Then Epic started teasing more details regarding the much anticipated Unreal Engine 4 and I started dreaming that it must be around the corner. Maybe I should build things with the idea that I’d migrate my work when Epic finally made the update from UDK to whatever they would end up calling the consumer version of UE4. Just as I was making this transition, I learned about Allegorithmic’s Substance Designer and their Database of over 700 procedural textures, and a new jumble of highly technical stuff was thrown at me. As quickly as I was adapting to this new paradigm of working with textures and materials, Allegorithmic added Physically Based Rendering (PBR) to the mix. I’d seen hints of this in one of the UE4 demos, so this just solidified the fact that this was going to be something important. Sure enough, here comes Marmoset with Toolbag 2.0 and a heavy emphasis on PBR, too. Better bone up on what this will bring to the workflow.

If that wasn’t enough, David Green with LilChips continued to offer me updates to his still alpha landscape-building software called Terresculptor, so I had to investigate those changes, too. An email pops into my mailbox from Allegorithmic inviting me to Los Angeles for a sneak peek into Substance Painter; I can’t resist. The first version is primitive, too primitive to work with, but great to steal a glimpse into what those guys have in mind. Luckily, I couldn’t deep dive into Painter yet and instead held my focus on other tasks while this software matured, but I now know that 3D painting is certainly going to be another tool in helping me achieve the kind of results that were exclusive to the Triple-A guys.

By late December, I was fully immersed in the process of building high-poly models, learning about retopology, and that auto-unwrapping UVs was not going to cut it. Displacement maps in modeling techniques looked appealing, and from what I was seeing from Surface Mimic, these maps that were being used in Substance Painter performed great in Blender and my sculpting tool of choice, 3D-Coat.

The problem was I was not making a lot of progress in building my world; all I was doing was learning all the time. With the New Year came a date on the calendar I needed to tend to: Steam Dev Days hosted by Valve. With a large portion of the Seattle-based conference focused on VR, I thought it might be worth the expense to learn more about this platform I was so fascinated with developing. As I wrote in a previous article, Gabe Newell made it possible for me to get a peek into their VR headset, where instantly I knew that not only was I on the right path, but this was going to be more epic than I imagined back when I first put on the Oculus Rift Dev Kit 1.

From Palmer Luckey, Joe Ludwig, Michael Abrash, and the rest of the people who were talking about VR during those days in the Pacific Northwest, it was made abundantly clear that large-scale environments weren’t ready for prime time yet. I didn’t want to acknowledge this because my hope was Nvidia would rectify poor frame rates with their new Maxwell line of GPUs, but slowly, I’ve given in to the idea that I would have to shelve part of the world for a time and find a different focus. Luckily, I found a compromise that would temporarily push my earlier efforts to the side while I focus on a “corner” that will allow for a tighter focus on the intimate instead of the massive.

Riding on the elation of what I’d seen in Seattle, I thought it was time to write an email – to Epic. Within 24 hours of that missive, I learned that I would be on the next cycle when new devs are brought on. I don’t think I could have been any more dumbfounded than I was at that moment. In about a week, I was downloading my own personalized (for security purposes?) version of UE4 (not its code name, but I’m not authorized to speak ‘its’ name :).

It has now been a couple of weeks since my head was spun around its axis, and things are starting to normalize if that is really possible. I’m again making progress in the creative department, but weaving all of this together is a gargantuan task. In three weeks, I’ll leave for San Francisco to make my first visit to GDC (the Game Developers Conference), where I’ll likely once again be overwhelmed by the rapid evolution that is occurring in this industry. None of this is a complaint; on the contrary, I’m too astonished right now to see any of this work as a burden. I stand humbled by the gravity of what is coming and am excited to see what is to be shared in the near future.

• NOTE: For historical accuracy, I need to point out that the context of this blog entry from 2014 was changed from a “WE” to an “I” perspective as the person who’d been collaborating with me from that time became hostile to the point I felt it best to remove references to him. At times, I’ll reference him as “Redacted.”