Luminal by Chaery Yoon

Chaery Yoon’s Luminal is a first-person VR simulation where players embody a fictional bioluminescent creature navigating the deep ocean. Using dynamic light patterns, the game communicates with players through bioluminescence as a language that sends warnings and shares fragmented memories. Each luminescent interaction between Luminal and the surrounding creatures propels the narrative.

First presented at MANIFESTO:IO, a symposium for new media and electronic art in Berlin(February 2025), artist and creative technologist Chaery Yoon takes on a unique workflow that blends 360° rendered videos from TouchDesigner with complex environments in Unreal Engine and created a custom 360° UI viewer for smooth VR viewing experience.

‘Using the Off World Live 360 camera, I was able to render high-quality 360 videos much faster than traditional methods. This was especially useful when dealing with heavy visual effects.’

VR Production with Off World Live, TouchDesigner and Unreal Engine

While Unreal Engine is widely used for VR production, Yoon has taken on the challenge of partially creating the experience in TouchDesigner. In her workflow, 360° particle effects rendered in TouchDesigner are integrated with an Unreal Engine environment to form a multi-layered, immersive storytelling experience.

Inspired by the Off World Live Masterclass with Function Store on real-time instancing, Yoon adopted an alternative method to pre-render visuals in TouchDesigner and create a 360° UI viewer in Unreal Engine using the Off World Live plugin.

The final experience is viewed on a Quest Pro VR headset. Since VR requires lightweight, optimized projects, this approach ensures smoother performance and greater stability compared to real-time rendering.

Rendering 360 Particle Effects in TouchDesigner

Yoon created particle-based light effects in TouchDesigner using noise patterns and geometry instancing. To ensure that these effects are appropriate for VR 360 viewing, she has avoided harsh edges or clipping.

These are prepared for 360 rendering using a Cube Map render pass and later converted to an equirectangular projection for spherical video playback in VR. Finally the projection is outputted to a Fit TOP to match the final resolution in 2:1 aspect ratio, and exported as a 4K MP4 video(2084 x 4096) with a solid black background.

Rendering 360 UE Environments with Off World Live

In addition to light-based effects, Yoon created four separate levels in Unreal Engine, featuring underwater and above-water sequences that help integrate the pre-rendered TD visuals into the sequence and provide triggers to blueprint animations.

These sequences are then  rendered out using the Off World Live 360 Degree Camera through Unreal Engine’s Movie Render Queue.

Creating a Dynamic 360 Viewer in Unreal Engine

These rendered sequences are then reimported to a new project, where the media sources are applied to a UV sphere acting as a sky dome.

The final Virtual Reality experience is pieced together via additional blueprint and UI interactions to trigger playback changes in each 360 viewer.

Core Components and Workflow

This workflow requires four main components:

• TouchDesigner: Rendering particle effects and rendering effects in 360 equirectangular format
• Unreal Engine: Unreal Engine as dynamic 360 viewer and environments renderer
• Off World Live 360 Degree Camera: OWL 360 Camera to create sequence and render through Unreal Engine Movie Render Queue
• Meta Quest Pro: Virtual Reality headset to view the packaged experience

Credits

Lead Artist, Worldbuilding, Unreal Engine Development:  Chaery Yoon

Sound Design, Spatial Mixing:  David Krajcík

Sound Composition:  Matheus Ferreira

Graphic Design:  Sung Eun Moon