Tutorial — Place Kits for Historic Interiors

Augmented Traveler local tutorial. Back to Unreal — Tutorials · first kit: Vestal House VR Room · props: Tutorial — USD for Maya · lighting: Tutorial — Kiosk Lighting for a Life-Size MetaHuman

How to build a place kit: a reusable, historically documented set of room pieces and props (the Mitchell family's Vestal Street rooms, the Atheneum hall, a whaleship deck). Figures stand in it on the kiosk and headsets. One kit serves many programs and surfaces.

Draft. Validate on the Vestal House room and update this page.

1. Evidence first

Source Use
HABS/HAER/HALS (Library of Congress: measured drawings, photographs and data pages of historic buildings), e.g. Swain-Mitchell House and Hadwen House on Nantucket Plans, sections, mouldings, window and door sizes. The Library of Congress presents HABS records as public domain; confirm for each record
Site visits (with permission): photographs, measurements, photogrammetry where allowed Surfaces, wear, colour, light direction
Inventories, letters, period interiors in museums Furniture and objects that belong in the room at the date
Historian and curator review Sign-off of every object and material

Log every choice in the place kit sheet: what it is based on, and what is interpreted (for example "wallpaper pattern based on 1840s New England examples; the original is unknown").

2. Kit structure

Places/<Kit>/
├── Meshes/        walls, floor, ceiling, trim, windows, doors (modular, on a grid)
├── Props/         furniture and objects (USD components from Maya)
├── Materials/     master materials + instances (plaster, pine floor, paint)
├── Levels/        L_<Kit>_Kiosk, L_<Kit>_Headset (lighting differs)
└── LevelInstances/ LI_<Kit>_Room, PLA_<Kit>_Shell (packed)
  1. Grid: model walls and trim on a real-world grid based on the building's measurements (for example 30 cm modules), so pieces snap.
  2. Modular pieces: a wall segment, a corner, a window bay, a door bay, skirting and cornice runs.
  3. Props: built in Maya as USD components with variants (Tutorial — USD for Maya). Examples: the telescope, desk, chair, oil lamp, chronometer, books.
  4. Materials: a few master materials (plaster, painted wood, bare wood, fabric, brass, glass) with instances. Keep period colour choices evidence-based.

3. Assemble in Unreal

4. Lighting per surface

Surface Lighting
Kiosk Lumen + MegaLights; period practicals (Tutorial — Kiosk Lighting for a Life-Size MetaHuman)
Quest / standalone headsets Baked lighting (Meta: "bake lighting whenever possible"). Build lightmaps with GPU Lightmass: needs DX12, a ray-tracing GPU, hardware ray tracing support, and virtual-texture lightmaps. It doesn't support World Position Offset or lighting channels, and ignores LODs. One movable light at most for the figure
PC-VR Baked plus a few dynamic lights, or Lumen if the budget allows

Lightmap UVs: every static mesh needs a clean second UV channel. Check lightmap density with the view mode before baking.

5. Budgets (starting points; profile and adjust)

Surface Draw calls Triangles in view Texture memory
Kiosk Generous (Nanite) — Largest
Quest 3 Keep low (target under about 200) About 750k–1M including the figure About 1 GB total

These numbers are working targets, not vendor limits. Confirm with profiling (Tutorial — Performance Profiling).

6. Check before a program uses the kit

Sources