Take A Stroll Through South Park With Tool's Oculus Rift Project

In a few short weeks in June of 2014, a small group of superfans at Tool came together and created a unique rendition of South Park. Using Oculus rift technology, users are able to step into the shoes of a citizen taking a stroll around the city.

The idea for the project came in late May. The team started with three goals in mind for the experiment. One, from a tech point of view, to sharpen their Unity and Oculus Rift development skills—two, from a creative point of view, to reimagine a well known story by allowing the user to experience it in the first person and—three, to finish the project in time to share with friends at the Cannes Lions Advertising Festival.

Taking inspiration from other renditions of the city of South Park, such as the most recent video game “Stick of Truth” and the season 17 show intro, the team felt that a combination of flat cutout characters and more dimensional paper-textured buildings was the way to go. They began work modeling the buildings of the city in Cinema 4D and laying out a rough version with placeholders in Unity.

Quite a bit of layering was done in order to achieve the desired look. Tool wanted to give the ground and streets some dimensionality beyond a 2d texture, so they created road plates at the base level and stacked sidewalk plates above these so as to create physical seams and imperfections. Utilizing Unity’s terrain feature, which would accept shadows and have more dimensionality, the team painted up the snow through the streets and sidewalk layers.

Credits

Chris K.: Producer

Matt G. Creative Director

Clay W.: ACD

Josh J.: Sr. Designer

Seth B.: Motion

Joy K.: HODP