VR Microvilli and Bowel Sequence

Specialist VR technical-art work spanning dense bowel simulation, microvilli rendering and headset-level optimisation.

This work sat inside a specialist VR pipeline where visual density had to coexist with hard standalone headset limits. The bowel sequence was the most technically challenging part: lots of motion, lots of collision, and no room for brute force solutions.

Bowel sequence

The sequence needed tens of thousands of moving villi inside a bowel that was also deforming, while thousands of drug particles could collide with the bowel wall in real time in VR.

Used 3D villi near the viewer, 2D plane-based villi at mid distance, and baked texture detail in the far field so density stayed high without blowing the budget.
Built the 2D and 3D villi as particles in Unity VFX Graph to get the GPU instancing benefits of the particle pipeline.
Used vertex shaders for the bowel wobble and villi motion so the whole surface stayed alive without expensive CPU animation.
Handled drug-particle collision against a baked signed distance field of the bowel wall, with the wobble layered on top so the collision surface moved with the shader deformation.
Used a more involved lighting setup than normal because lighting particles, cards and meshes together in a convincing way is not straightforward.

Realtime bowel sequence scene with dense villi and particle motion

To make the far-detail bake hold up from the actual player viewpoint, I wrote a custom Blender Python script that baked from a camera point rather than a generic direction. That let me push texture quality where the user would actually stand.

Blender scene showing the dense 3D bowel model used as the source for the texture bake

Test render from the custom Blender Python camera-point bake workflow

Microvilli scene

The separate microvilli scene was less technically extreme than the bowel sequence, but it still helped develop the same crossover of modelling, baking, VFX, lighting and shader work.

Built more experience with Blender modelling and baking workflows for dense biological surfaces.
Extended my Unity VFX Graph, material and vertex-shader work on stylised but technically constrained scenes.
Kept pushing on lighting and readability for unusual organic environments in VR.

Placeholder image for the separate microvilli scene

This page is a good example of the kind of technical-art competence I built up over time: not just making a scene look interesting, but finding practical rendering and content-pipeline solutions when the visual target is expensive by default.