Tyler Crump CV

3D modelling and animation · team of 4 · Blender + Unreal Engine

Abandoned house

An eerie, sterile-dystopian house explored in first person in Unreal Engine, patrolled by a robot vacuum with a teddy bear riding on top. Made in a team of four for 3D Modelling and Animation at Macquarie University. I made most of the assets, the animation and the layout.

Role
Modelling, animation and layout
Team
4 people
Tools
Blender 4.5 · Unreal Engine
Unit
3D Modelling and Animation
Year
2025
In-engine screenshot of the living room: red couches, a coffee table and a retro TV under a single ceiling light, with the teddy bear riding the robot vacuum across the floor
The security drone crossing the living room, in Unreal Engine.

The brief

Our team chose a scanning surveillance robot, an abandoned house and a sterile dystopian style, and aimed for a scene that feels eerie and unsettling. The player starts outside in a forest, with trees and shrubs blocking their view, and explores the house in first person. Horror tropes shaped the details, like a rocking chair moving by itself in a room deep inside the house.

The security drone

  • The scene's central animated model: a robot vacuum with a teddy bear riding it, holding reins like a chariot
  • Animated along a movement path, it loops through the rooms and docks at its charging station for a while before setting off again, so movement breaks the stillness of an otherwise abandoned house and lures the player to follow it
  • The bear's armature makes its head flop as the vacuum turns, faking ragdoll physics through weight painting rather than a physics simulation
  • Deliberately low poly (16-edge cylinders and 16×8 UV spheres), so the bear's soft, slumped shape still reads clearly from the player's view in Unreal

Building the scene in Unreal

  • The scene was assembled in Blender first to catch assets that broke on FBX export, which were repacked and fixed before importing into Unreal Engine
  • Laid out from the largest pieces down: the house and interior first, then trees, shrubs and the perimeter fencing
  • Post-process volumes add atmosphere: auto exposure and film grain at the fence line, grain near the TV and the charging dock, and desaturation around the drone
  • Lighting tells the story: orange bulbs worn out from being left on, blown and flickering lights, and a purple light in the closet that no other room uses
  • Environmental storytelling: the owner's keys and phone sit on the shelf by the front door, as if they came home and vanished
First-person view on the path to the house, almost hidden by thick purple fog, with pine trees either side
The approach: fog hides the house until you're close.
Low-poly pine trees framing the side of the house, with warm light leaking through a window into the fog
Trees frame the view outside, and a light left on inside leaks through the blinds.
The retro TV on a wooden cabinet, covered in heavy film grain from a post-process volume
A post-process volume adds film grain when you look at the TV, like static.
View through a doorway into a closet lit purple, with the drone's charging dock and the rocking chair inside
The closet is the only room lit purple, hiding the charging dock and the rocking chair.

How the team worked

We listed every model in a shared document and split the roles by strength: Unreal scene design, common models, and the complex animated model. Each model was blocked out from basic meshes before detailed modelling, and the whole scene shared one gradient colour palette (a texture atlas from itch.io), which kept UV colouring quick and the project lighter.