King Æthelstan

VR Production
Project Brief
This project began as a 3D scan created by Andrew Sinclairand is currently in production. It will become a Unity-based Virtual Reality experience, allowing the public to wear a Meta Quest headset and explore it as part of the 1000th anniversary of King Æthelstan’s coronation in Kingston Upon Thames. As part of the project, the physical statue features an interactive ‘Mona Lisa effect,’ where the eyes of Æthelstan, his aunt Æthelflaed, Odin’s raven Muninn, and his hound Ægir all appear to follow the viewer. Click here to read more about the project.
My Contributions
I handled the full 3D production pipeline for the digital sculpture. I cleaned up the 3D scan of King Æthelstan in ZBrush, restoring lost details and correcting artifacts. Then, I retopologized the model in Maya, optimizing the poly count for smooth performance in Unity. I UV-mapped the model and textured it in Procreate, using a texture atlas to enable high-resolution textures in Unity, since UDIMs are not supported. The project is now in the rigging and animation production phase.
Behind the scenes

The 3D scanner struggled capturing details such as flooding creases and details. In ZBrush, these areas were carefully separated and refined using photographic references to restore the sculpture’s accuracy and depth while staying as true to the original sculpture as possible.

The original 3D scan was 5 million polygons and it has been reduced to 200,000 vertices.
To maximize resolution and performance within Unity, the sculpture has been split up into 4 shaders. Each contains an atlas texture map of 2048*2048 and within it contains 4x 1024*1024 UV maps.
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