Recreating Surrealist Paintings in VR

Virtual reality allows us to step out of our world and into another one. With this concept in mind, a teammate and I have started building out virtual worlds based on Surrealist paintings. Here, I will explain my process of creating a 3d world based on Rene Magritte’s painting Golconda.

My first step in recreating this painting was forming three-dimensional versions of the men in the scene. I did this fairly quickly using Adobe Fuse. Fuse is a software still in beta that allows you to create three dimensional characters with a simple, easy to learn interface.

Next, I used Adobe Maximo (a web app that pairs with Fuse) to give the character a bone structure and animate the way he stands.

I imported my character into Unity (the software we are using to build our VR world) as a prefab. Then, I downloaded some free houses from the Unity asset store and arranged them in a square around the camera rig. I created a terrain under the houses, and paved it with a cobblestone material I found in the asset store.

The last step was to build a C# script that would dynamically create a three-dimensional grid of my characters when the scene is entered.