Willem Gillis

CG Generalist & Software Developer

Butterflies in a VR garden.


Game created for the usage in a study of a medical student writing his thesis about how Virtual Reality can help people’s rehabilitation after a stroke.

The most important aspect was that the game should relax and engage people still struggling to walk. How you choose to implement that was your own choice. Our concept was that of a calm butterfly garden.

There were two possible situations and thus two somewhat different versions of the game. In one, the patient can already freely walk around the room and in the other, the patient uses a treadmill.

    Two yellow and one purple butterfly fly around between various flowers, trees, ...
    Butterfly-garden: screenshot 1
    Failed catch of a pink butterfly.
    Butterfly-garden: screenshot 6

The patient starts in an empty garden and as he walks around more and more objects and butterflies appear. The patient has to catch butterflies of a certain colour with a butterfly net. Just how many he has to catch and how soon these objects begin to appear, gets inputted by a doctor. In the treadmill version the patient uses a tally counter to aim towards the butterflies and so ‘catch’ them. This to make it more easy for them.

An orange butterfly passes while sitting on the ground.
Butterfly-garden: screenshot 5

To track the speed of the treadmill and pass it through to the game so the player character moves forward with the same speed as the patient, we created a piece of hardware to mount on the treadmill. We designed, 3d modeled and printed it.

    Blueprint of speed tracking hardware.
    Butterfly-garden: hardware blueprint
    Photos of speed tracking hardware.
    Butterfly-garden: hardware

To make the butterflies more interesting, we wanted each of them to look somewhat different from each other. That’s why we made the wings with Substance Designer and the body with Houdini so they could be procedurally generated during gameplay.

A couple of procedurally made wings with Substance Designer and Houdini.
Butterfly-garden: procedural wings
  • Unity

  • Cinema 4D

  • Houdini

  • Substance Designer

  • Substance Painter

  • Adobe Photoshop

  • Adobe Illustrator

  • Marlies Geerts

  • Willem Gillis