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There's normal, there's paranormal, and then there's... HYPONORMAL.

Imagine a world encapsulated inside a sphere such that gravity - rather than attracting towards the center of mass - instead repels outwards. What would walking in such a counterintuitive world feel like? How would people inhabit and develop this world over time? What kind of stories does this world have to tell?

This non-Newtonian, non-Euclidean premise formed the basis for HYPONORMAL, a barren desert microworld battered and beaten by perpetual sandstorms. You are granted a unique opportunity to tread across these unforgiving lands and experience the spherical prison that eternally tethers you - and the ones who fell before you - to the ground.

Perhaps the most iconic part of the dev process and final look is my admittedly scuffed attempt at translating the Cinema 4D/Redshift render workflow that I'm familiar with into a realtime/interactive form. To bridge the gap between Redshift and Unity, I used Unity's High-Definition Render Pipeline (HDRP) to make lookdev far easier for me to work with. I quickly found out the hard way how taxing volumetrics and realtime lighting truly were; since the scene I was building had no shortage of lights, I had to compromise lighting quality with performance. This meant spending a LOT of time tweaking and testing lighting configurations.

Assets were sourced from a variety of places; some were made from scratch, some were taken from places (esp. Scan the World), and some were kitbashed together. Most of the intermediate modeling work was done in Cinema 4D; for example, C4D's mograph capabilities allowed for easy art-directed auto-generation of broken buildings.