[Banner Image: Achal Sahu, 2025]

The Virtual World Building undergraduate elective is available to all SIT undegraduate students across Product Design, 3D Modelling, Games & VR and Sound in their second or third year and gives students an opportunity to explore the practice of concepting and developing rich 3D virtual spaces - and bringing them to life with the Unreal Engine.

In games, animation, TV production and so on, this can be quite a specialised role - distinct from that of the 3D modellers who may work on the individual components that go into the world - and that practice is followed here, with students focussing on design, layout and flow through a virtual space rather than modelling the individual elements that make it up.

Working with the terrain tools in Unreal, students create a landscape, and populate this landscape using pre-existing 3D models and assets. Unreal Blueprints and plugins allow the world to be enriched with more realistic water or weather effects, and megascans allow for rich and complex visual detail.

Students have complete freedom as to the worlds they choose to build - from cosy alpine villages to cyberpunk cities to underwater ruins, lunar or desert landscapes, the world is literally theirs to build. Finally, students also get to develop their skills in animation techniques and for virtual film production - creating high resolution cinematic fly through reels to showcase their work.