The Work

The Project

Drizzy Manor was a self-directed publicity piece meant to introduce my VR development and architectural visualization company (Named OPIATS, at the time) to the world, in a space that was crowded.

The project was meant to capture the attention of the press, drive traffic to the official OPIATS site, and create partnerships and relationships with various tech companies and brands that wanted to integrate Hollywood/the music industry, with emerging technology.

The Brief

The self-directed brief was simple: What would be the easiest way to get attention for a fledgling company in the VR space?

The answer? Build the over the top house owned by the biggest rapper in the world in a game engine.

The project was meant to captivate the attention of the public, and bring one of the biggest musicians in the world into the next generation by incorporating Virtual Reality.

The Results

Despite being crude and basic in its execution, Drizzy Manor ended up breaking the internet and getting viral traffic that any brand would kill for. Major theatre chains, PC hardware companies, chipset manufacturers and emerging technology companies wanted integration into the product, to be showcased on the world stage.

In the first three days the teaser site - consisting of just a trailer showing a fly-through of the virtual house, garnered over a million views, with over 10 million lifetime views before the site came down a few months later.

The project received coverage from Polygon, one of the biggest gaming sites on the internet, TeenVogue, Esquire, GQ, and Complex, among others.

The Process

The process of building Drizzy Manor was a bit chaotic since it was my first time modeling 3D content of any kind - of course I started with a superstar’s mansion!

Ultimately - I built the walls, floors and ceilings in Autodesk’s Revit. Once the shell of the home was complete, I brought it into Unreal Engine as an unoptimized mess of meshes, where I added furniture, lighting, and way too many particle effects. My computer was so underpowered for the task I ended up using Ambient Occlusion in place of shadows so the editor wouldn’t crash.

Credits

DIRECTOR: ANDRE ELIJAH

DEVELOPMENT: ANDRE ELIJAH

3D ART + ANIMATION: ANDRE ELIJAH