The Abandoned Soviet "Backrooms?" 🏚️
With the internet phenomena of uncanny spaces being more prevalent than ever, we wanted to share an example of one of our favorite liminal places that became an urbex icon, Wünsdorf-Waldstadt, nicknamed "Little Moscow".
Soviet forces occupying East Germany in the cold war established this city of 75,000 military personnel, civilians, and their families a little under 30 miles from Berlin… But it was completely sealed off from the German public. A train line connected the town directly to Moscow, and supposedly people stationed here rarely ever actually left the town to go into the rest of East Germany.
But beneath it was the true secret. Wünsdorf was built on top of massive bunker complexes previously used for high command in Reich-era Germany. Endless mazes of administrative offices, comms rooms, and blast doors hidden with entrances in plain sight disguised as Rural cottages. The soviets expanded upon the tunnel systems & installed soviet tech, essentially retrofitting a Nazi super-bunker for USSR use.
But in September of ‘94, the Soviets had overstayed their welcome, and simply vanished overnight. Utilizing the train to Moscow, the stores in Wünsdorf were left stocked with early 90s era electronics, homes stood abandoned with televisions still in their place and calendars on the wall were frozen in September of '94. Even military goods, including 100,000 rounds of ammunition, waste oil, chemicals, and military vehicles were simply left to rot in the woods. Overnight, it became a ghost city.
This set the stage perfectly for one of the world's most prime "liminal spaces" for Urb-Ex enthusiasts to explore in the 2000s. Red velvet seats of the grand cinema were colonized by mold, statues of Lenin smothered with moss & vines, facades crumbled, seafoam-green paint and murals depicting a worker's paradise peeled and faded, and an olympic-sized swimming pool with its floating lane dividers still installed sit bone dry under rusted skylights above.
To us it perfectly encapsulates the allure of the backrooms. A place that it seems like humans simply de-spawned from, quietly awaiting its next caretakers that would never come.
Came up with a real simple way to make these flasks look like they have liquid! 💦
1. Model glass & invert the normals
2. Model the liquid
3. Rig the liquid with a bone facing up
4. in engine apply "jiggle physics" with negative gravity
#gamedev#unity#blender#animation#b3d
Champions once again! Congratulations to Texas Softball on repeating as Women's College World Series champions. What an achievement for this team, this program and Longhorn Nation.
Hook 'em! 🤘