In this project we venture to the depths of Tytyri mine, as part of the Virtual Nature Project. Tytyri mine is a magical place located in the city of Lohja where you can learn about the geological and mining history, enjoy art exhibitions and visit their mascot troll’s, Rönni’s, living quarters. They still mine limestone there from the deeper levels of the cave that is off limits to the visitors.
The Trainees got to visit the site and design an enhanced map application with the Leads to improve the mine experience for kids and families. It was a unique experience that the team really enjoyed doing and it shows in the end!
Text by Niina Kahela
Hello. My name is Niina Kahela, I’m a 3D student from Metropolia, soon to graduate. I love stylized 3D models and textures. My adventures in the HXRC as a trainee have been as a 2D and a 3D artist. I have been tasked with coming up with ideas, doing various art tasks, fiddling with game engines, pitching for clients and voluntarily taking care of the office plants.
I worked on this project for a while and it took me from my safe area, which is making 3D models and texturing, to the more unknown, which was a new 3D format, lighting and optimizing the unity scene. My team also included Emmi Isokirmo (Art lead), Juho Puurunen (Coding lead) and two trainees, Alma and Samuli, who will introduce and share their experiences on this project next.
Trainees introduction: Alma Hoque the UI artist
Hello, I’m Alma Hoque. Currently working as a 3D Artist trainee at Helsinki XR Center. I am a fresh graduate from the XR Design degree at Metropolia UAS. And I got the opportunity to work with project Tytyri. My role involved working with the UI elements. Also creating the final print-ready files for our partner to lay around all the signs that included the codewords for the application. Creating the final trailer was one of the tasks that I got to do too.
In general, I am very pleased with the outcome of this project. And getting to design for such a unique partner has given me a lot of insights working with physically difficult environments.
The temperature in the mine is +8℃ throughout the year and the humidity is very high. Also each visitor will be given a safety helmet during their visit at the mine. So clearly a VR experience was out of the question. That is why we ended up creating a WebGL build that would work on both Android and iOS phones.
Huge appreciation towards my lovely team members and especially to Niina for making everything look sooo beautiful.
Trainees introduction: Samuli Haltimo the Coder
Hey, I’m Samuli Haltimo, a game developer intern at Helsinki XR Center. I am still studying Game Development in Metropolia and expect to graduate early next year. For this project, I was responsible for both code design and development. My work built on the foundation laid by Ville Varhala, who had previously contributed as an intern. I was given a lot of freedom to design the code as I saw fit, which made this a great learning experience.
This was my first time developing a WebGL-based application in Unity, which presented its own challenges. Some features that worked smoothly in mobile-targeted builds didn’t function as expected in the WebGL version. Luckily, our code lead Juho Puurunen was highly experienced with WebGL builds, so I received valuable support from him. In the end, we were able to achieve a final product that performed similarly to a downloadable application.
There were some problems getting the WebGL build to fullscreen on iOS, but I won’t go deeper into that subject as it could warrant its own blog post. Our other intern, Miro Mariapori, who’s more experienced in web development, helped us out and made vital contributions to the final image of the application.
I was also responsible for designing code for another pilot project part of The Virtual Nature project, while simultaneously working on Tytyri. This dual responsibility made the design process an exciting challenge, as I aimed to create reusable code for both projects. One area in particular, the camera movement, was shared between the two projects. Although small adjustments were needed for each, the core system was designed to function smoothly in both. Aside from the camera functionality, the projects were quite different. This was also my first experience designing code architecture at such a large scale, so there were certainly challenges along the way. However, now that both projects are complete, I feel I’ve successfully overcome those challenges, and I’m pleased with the result.
Thank you Alma and Samuli for your amazing professional contribution to the project! This wouldn’t have worked without you two and the extra help we got in the way.
The Project: Who, why and how
We did this pilot in cooperation with Pure Experience, a catering company with an extensive range of skills in professional fine dining to tour guiding and a wide scale of cooperation partners creating unforgettable memories. They also offer events in the Tytyri Mine Experience located in the city of Lohja, Finland. And this is the location the project was taking place in.
In this project we were to come up with an idea and a prototype to bring more to do to the younger visitors in the Tytyri; something that makes them feel more excited wandering the mines and leave them wanting to come back. My role was to ideate the concept, and make everything art related and make it work in Unity. I wanted to make it into a stylized, fantasy like mine, with lots of colors and mystical feel, and I succeeded in this.
We developed many ideas with Pure Experience about how we would approach the need, and decided that doing an interactive map in mobile, would be the most fun and doable suggestion. So we had meetings, we pitched ideas and came up with this idea of a map that would show the Tytyri mine.
The finished gray boxing of the layout of the mine.
The sketch of the layer view of the Tytyri mine.
Our partner also liked the idea that we could show the mine compared to the surface buildings and get the sense of depth that way.
We would plant codewords in the actual real life location and in the app you will write the codewords to the “Where to next:” box. Writing the code will lead you to the point of interest, where it will tell interesting facts of that exact location and the theme of it. Then you just go back to the map scenery and continue your adventure in real life until you find another codeword. We planted 12 of these words in the mine and made them sized A5, half of a regular printer paper, so that you would actually have to search for them a bit.
As Alma noted before, we couldn’t use VR because they would clash with the helmets in the underground location. AR was also out of question due to the darkness in the cave. So we provided them with this game feeling map application without XR features.
Codeword pamphlets that you will find in the cave.
The workflow: Steps to the finished product
Next I will explain my workflow and tools used in this project.
I made it structurally like one would in games. First you will sketch the ideas and layout, then do a gray box modeling of the layout and test it in Unity if it feels right. Then sketching the props and making low poly models of them. After that it’s just a matter of making everything look beautiful and cohesive by texturing and lighting in the game engine. With the props ready you can place them in the environment and then after the UV maps are ready you will bake the lighting and voilà, it’s done. Well, in theory anyways. I had to do some back and forth play with the files to make everything work.
Environment and the props placed in Unity without the textures.
Environment and the props with ready textures.
Light added and baked in Unity.
The tools I used are pretty common as well. Photoshop for concepts, Maya for modeling, assigning material ID’s and UV mapping, Substance Painter for texturing and Unity as a game engine.
I stumbled across many challenges during the project. First of all was the new format for 3D objects called glTF. It is the most optimized format for webGL and mobile builds by its way of packing and handling information. What was so hard using it then? Well, first we had to figure out the easiest way to export objects from Maya. The addon we used was Babylon.js exporter and it worked great for our needs. Substance painter doesn’t read glTF files, so I had to first export the objects as FBX to texture them and then as glTF for the game engine.
Then we needed the Unity’s add-on glTFast to import it to the game engine. Compared to FBX format glTF couldn’t be edited as flexibly in Unity. But because this was a stylized low poly environment, not much editing was needed. More important way of optimizing it, however, is the way you make the 3D objects and UV maps. I merged object meshes and UV maps together as one chunk per room and that made the game really smooth to run.
Statistics on the finished product that shows the worth of optimizing as the batches stay fairly low.
Second problem was with time management. I had a grandiose idea at the start to make the map change color from gray to colorful as the user discovers the places with the codewords. Our art lead, Emmi, found a way to do this with shaders, but because I used Unity’s spotlights to color a big part of the cave, it ended up to be too big of a hassle to implement that in the middle of the project. So we had to give up the idea, and focus on making it run smoothly and looking nice. We also decided on having Rönni, Tytyri’s mascot troll, appear whenever you write a code to emote as an extra fun element while finding all the code words. Emmi was responsible for the character and animated and implemented it in Unity.
As the project has ended I now look back and realize that it needed a much stricter structure and deadlines per tasks. I had the freedom to make decisions while building the mine but that led to an overwhelming feeling of the unknown. Thoughts like can I do this and this in time and do I still want to implement more animations or the colorization run through my mind unnecessarily. Without the hesitations and second guessing the project would have been more pleasant and more goal oriented to work on.
Rönni is waiting for you in the mines.
Project Highlights
The highlight of the project was definitely designing the mine, texturing it and giving it life with the lighting. As I stated earlier, fantastical stylized 3D worlds are my passion, and to be able to bring this real world place, Tytyri, to a digitized version was so much fun! I started to do the concepts early on based on the maps given to me and when I finally got to visit the place it was funny how familiar it was and how I got some things so wrong in my initial sketches. I got to take lots of photos of the props there and think about the points of interest.
The places where the codewords would reside and what kind of information they would give. Using the Unity’s tools for colorizing the mine with many different spotlights was fun and frustrating at the same time since I had to do it a bit blindly and generate light baking often to see how it would look in the build. Our partner did a wonderful job writing all the informative texts of the points of interests we chose together.
Conclusion
This project gave me so much as an artist. As I was doing this entire thing from start to finish it taught me about optimization, researching, light baking, using glTF, client interaction and time management! I looked forward to using these new skills in the next project and now that I have used them I feel so much more confident and comfortable making time estimates and executing my ideas. This was a dream project for me, and I hope it shows.
Thank you for this great project with an awesome team. And visit the Tytyri experience mines if this piques your interest!
Key Stakeholders and Collaboration
Virtual Nature Project is co-funded by the European Union and Uudenmaan liitto (2023-2025). The project brings together a talented team, including experts from Haaga-Helia UAS, Humak UAS, and Metropolia UAS.
Tytyri project was initiated with Pure Experience in collaboration with Tytyri Elämyskaivos.
On the Metropolia UAS side, the project was implemented by a dedicated team from the Helsinki XR Center led by Project Manager Janina Rannikko and Project Lead Emmi Isokirmo. Contributing their expertise were HXRC specialists Juho Puurunen, Mikko Höök, and Santeri Saarinen. Additionally, HXRC interns Alma Hoque, Niina Kahela, Samuli Haltimo, and Ville Varhala played key roles in developing the solution.
Virtual Nature is a collaboration of:
To see previous news about our trainees’ projects, head over to the Trainee news section.
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