Updates: 3D menus

[sophia]

# 2

This week, I sketched out what I thought the 3D environment should look like and decided that the objects should not animate (unless they are looked upon). I began to build the basic environment for where the objects will lie and am very inspired by the game, Cosmic Trip, which features lots of desert scenes with beautiful oranges, pink and blues in the sky.

Learnings:
1) Textures are powerful but the amount of polygons and draw calls can really add up quickly
a. I learned this when I set out to use a basic sand texture, and while it worked fine while I was on my computer, when I went to view it on the Samsung Gear VR, it became incredibly splotchy
b. I spent about 3 hours trying to figure out what could be the cause of the splotchiness, did everything from reducing the total amount of pixels in the scene to decreasing the size of the texture. Finally, was able to figure out that I needed to disable shadow casting. Once turned off, the splotchy-blackness stopped and I was able to refocus on building out the scene.
2) For gear VR, the more the dynamic environment looks (with mountains, hills, outside objects), the more calming the entire scene feels
1. I am still figuring out the aesthetic that I am going for, which makes me wish there was  a faster way to build to the samsung gear vr (because you can't fully comprehend what you are building until you put on the headset) and be able to make tiny tweaks in it (i.e. move the river over to the left or make the blue slightly lighter/darker).

I hope to be done with the basic scene by this weekend so I can move onto adding the 3D objects that represent categories into the scene.

Would love anyones feedback about textures and how to limit the amount of polygons/ draw calls in their app. Also, if they have any tricks with making planes appear more like textures. Is it possible to use a plane for most of the layout and then add smaller textures in areas that you want to have texture on and therefore, you are further limiting the amount of polygons/draw calls in the scene?

[sophia]

#3

Going to start doing all update on this thread VS continuously posting new threads 🙂

I got really into figuring out what the background of the menu should look like.. 
Understanding that I wanted a Cosmic Trip- feel, I did a search for Cinema4D with sand and water and found:

https://www.instagram.com/p/7gnLbIGpRz/?taken-by=gridspec

https://www.instagram.com/p/BCXkWSkGpQn/

https://www.instagram.com/p/BGmiJDbmpYA/?taken-by=gridspec

I wanted to keep the sky looking as realistic as possible, was hoping to find a blend of blues and pink (my favorite time of day) and experiment with using real images + game like assets

after much experimenting ended the week with the build looking like this:

Would love your thoughts on the layout! 

This week I am working on incorporating the 3D assets 🙂 

[akababa]

Love the look and feel!

[SBarrick]

I really like your reference art! Its low poly without being too low poly, its really nice. 🙂

[Anonymous]

The reference art is awesome! You might also want to check out some of Erica Layton's (https://forums.oculus.com/developer/profile/erica_layton) work if you haven't. Her aesthetics are awesome too although the colors are different.

[sophia]

Update #4

Have been working hard on learning Unity through the Gear VR build. It's been an incredibly insightful process as Unity first feels relatively easy to pick up, but of course, the more that you'd like to incorporate into the build, the harder that it gets. The lack of resources for the gear VR has been a hurdle and have found that asking people who have been building with Unity for VR is usually more direct and leads to a much quicker turnaround. 

One of the biggest snags that I ran into this week was adding interactivity to the Gear VR application. 

At first, I was looking to add interactivity through this Oculus blog, to quickly find that the OVR Unity assets/scripts had been changed and so the references, no longer worked.

For those interested in knowing how to add interactivity, this person seems to update every few months on the Oculus forums with the best way to add interactivity (it worked for me): https://forums.oculus.com/developer/discussion/16710/new-unity-ui-ovr-look-based-input-howto

Once interactivity was added, had to figure out how to write a couple scripts to enable the kind of 'look and tap' interactivity that I desired. In all honesty, I would love to enable gaze but for the purposes for prototyping, am just wrapping my head around 'look and tap'.
-> On that note, if anyone has any good resources on how to enable gaze in the gear vr, please let me know 🙂 

I've also learned a lot about lighting - once I hooked up the two scenes that I have been designing, the lighting in the second scene greatly diminished and am now working to get it back to how it was when the scenes were separate. I can tell the second scene is a lot harder on the phone and learning to optimize for the gear is key to all of this.
-> What resources have some of you been using to learn more about scripting in Unity?

[ameliawb]

awesome!

[sophia]

Update #5

One of the most under-resourced yet most talked about issues with VR experiences is anti-aliasing.

Anti-aliasing is what I have been struggling with for the past few weeks. While I feel that I’ve been innovating a lot on design, I’ve found myself struggling with constant anti-aliasing that ruins the in-headset experience. 

Through using many Gear VR products, I now understand how developers need to optimize to not allow aliasing to happen in the app. Inspired by John Carmack’s recent post on anti-aliasing, I’ve also been working on a list of my own learnings to reduce anti-aliasing (and I still have quite a bit of it so suggestions are welcome!):

• Reducing the amount of polygons in your experience. I use Simplygon to reduce the amount of polygons, which is a great tool that allows you to reduce the amount of polygons on 3D assets, without ruining how it looks. 


• Keeping your textures as small as possible
• 
  
  
  
  • I am using water as the main texture for the experience, and I realized that through adding any other elements to the experience, those would immediately be aliased because the water is so taxing on the experiment. 
  
  
  • Water and other types of environment textures take up a LOT of the GPU on the phone. What looks good in your computer will probably NOT look good in a Gear VR. I made a small water around the FOV have waves and the rest of the water in the distance not have waves to decrease the GPU.
  • I actually had to take out the sand texture and switch it to a solid color to reduce it as well.


• Ask for help from an experiened game developer!! They know more tricks than any newbie 🙂

As we near the end of the bootcamp program - I still am having a lot of issues with aliased lines- if anyone has any tips for making their product more solid, I’d love to hear them!

[sophia]

Also, forgot to mention that because I've still been experimenting with 3D menus, ran into a wall where I couldn't find any 3D assets that were what I needed.. Ended up wondering why there wasn't a 'noun project for 3D assets'?

Some friends recommended checking out turbosquid, yobi3D, and a few others, but on the former, the assets were always too game-like and on the latter, sometimes the files types would not be where they were hosted and if downloaded, wouldn't work in Unity. (Didn't want to pay for such simple assets and also Unity assets also seem to be too game-like).

Ended up teaching myself SketchUp, to create a simple bowl took more than 4 hours.... but look:



🙂

[erica_layton]

Sophia, what 3D assets do you need for menu/UI components? What shapes do you need?