Art Spotlight: Space Tiki Bar

About us

Hello human life forms—we are Ronit Wolf and Marcus Morba, two creative spirits from Bavaria/Germany. We joined forces some years ago due to Ronit’s amazing Science & Fiction Festival at the Deutsches Museum/Munich and one result of our collaboration is a Mozilla Hubs Space, which we want to present to you in this feature.

With Ronit as creative mind/art director and Marcus as digital executor/3D enthusiast, we participated in XR Hub Bavaria’s open call to create a virtual venue for events and meetings in virtual reality.

Our idea – a SPACE TIKI BAR on a lonely exoplanet

The fantastic journey to a remote exoplanet takes the astronaut to the mysterious Space Tiki Bar. An unknown culture has left a hodgepodge of exotic plants, artifacts, and architecture on this planet.

Try and fail—a Mozilla Hubs Challenge

Not really being experienced with the Mozilla Hubs Environment and the required workflow in the beginning, we underestimated the challenges we needed to solve during the creation process.

1. Import of the 3D assets into Mozilla Spoke (Hubs Editor Environment) and preserving the look and feel.
2. Limitations in the polygon count/complexity of the scene in Spoke.
3. Limitations of the total scene file size in Spoke.

Our final workflow

After trying out several approaches like, e.g., an export/import (Spoke Doc) of a complete scene or single models as glTFs from Cinema 4D into Spoke, we ended up with the following workflow.

By exporting single assets of the scene to Sketchfab and using the reupload feature, we took advantage of the possibility to optimise each model step-by-step (mainly by repeating step 2: reducing polygon count and texture sizes) while having an easy and fast way to optimize textures directly in Sketchfab and update the object in the Spoke Editor by reentering the object URL, so the updated model from Sketchfab was reloaded.

Going low-poly

For our custom models, we used Cinema 4D for modeling and texturing. Most PBR textures have been created with Filter Forge.

Two real lifesavers here were the automatic glTF conversion of Sketchfab Pro and the polygon reduction and texture baking features of InstaLOD.

In addition to the main interior, we also used Sketchfab models available under Creative Commons licenses and optimized them for use in Spoke to style the space for different events and themes.

The final result

A major key role for the final result and the atmosphere of the space is the lightning. We wanted to create a more intense mood compared to most daylight Mozilla Hubs Spaces that we have seen. We experimented a lot with different setups and settings until we found a satisfying result. You can explore the room in Mozilla Hubs here.

Some of last year’s highlights besides our own events: we had the honor to host the ceremony of the “DigAMus Award 2020” (German only), an event for ‘Deutsches Museum – Digital’. The award honors excellent digital projects from the German museum landscape. For the 1E9-Conference we integrated the event livestream into the space, so visitors were able to discuss virtually while watching the main event presentations.