This is Cecile and this post also appears on my blog.
What a challenging week! My VR journey into the Oculus Launch Pad — Week 9
We are finishing week 9 of the Oculus Launch Pad program and for most participants it means they have 3 weeks left to complete their prototype.
This is not exactly the case for me, as I never like to do like everyone else! For me the deadline is now. Or never. Let me explain. 1) I am no longer eligible to compete for funding (read why here and don’t worry, it’s rather good news!) so I don’t really have to comply with submission requirements.
Oculus Launch Pad program — Requirement of submission for funding (from https://www.oculus.com/launch-pad/)
2) Moreover, I am going on vacation next week and will only be back after the program’s deadline. I will be travelling with my family and won’t be available to do much work during our trip. My plan was to keep targeting to submit my prototype on time and even be ready to submit before my vacation. Well, that’s not going to happen. This week has been quite challenging, and it’s very clear now that I won’t be ready before my trip.
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Challenge #1: upgrading my phone to Android Nougat
Last week, we had a very insightful video conference with Chris Pruett, who is Head of Mobile Development Engineering at Oculus. One of his recommendation was to upgrade our phones to Android Nougat, aka Android 7. I had previously brought the Samsung Galaxy S7 phone that I use for development to my local AT&T store to get help upgrading, but the staff had no clue how to do it! I have also tried to do so with Samsung’s software Kies and Smart Switch — no luck.
On the conference call, Chris mentioned that just sticking a SIM card in the phone should enable to get the firmware update. So I went to another, bigger, AT&T store. The staff there was a little bit more helpful, they did put an active SIM in my phone, but again, when checking for an upgrade the message back was that the software was up to date. The store manager offered to ask his contact at Samsung and to call me back with more info. After 5 long days, he came back with this response:
Cecile the rep from Samsung just got back to me. He is telling me that the update should be releasing in a couple weeks due to current bugs
It’s crazy how things that should be simple can fail and take a lot of time.Several fellow Launch Pad participants went to Best Buy to get the update and it worked well for them. I will have to try my local Best Buy.
Challenge #2: setting up my phone for development
I have been going through a lot of documentation on the Oculus developers website. One of the first things to do to get started with VR app development is to to set up my device for running, debugging, and testing my Gear VR application. It’s all explained in the Device Setup guide. Unfortunately, my Samsung Galaxy S7 did not behave this way with my PC and I got stuck straight away. Basically, when I enable USB debugging, I never get this screen:
I never managed to see this screen
Also, it seems that there is something weird with the S7 as I never saw the ‘Use USB for Software installation’ options with it, and I can see it with my Galaxy S6 edge. Both phones run Android 6.0.1.
Screenshot from my Samsung Galaxy S6 edge (left) and S7 (right). The S7 does not offer the ‘Software installation’ option
I tried installing new Samsung USB drivers on my PC and it did not solve the issue. I plugged my S7 onto my husband’s Mac and it worked straight away. Again, it feels a bit disappointing to get stuck with small things like that so early in the process and spend so much time fixing what seems like little things.
Challenge #3: creating a 360 video player in Unity
The main thing I wanted to achieve this week was to create a 360 video player using Unity. I am happy to say that I succeeded! Yay!
However, it was not a smooth process either. I was trying to follow guidelines provided earlier on by my Unity teacher, Sarah Stumbo. There were 2 different methods and I was not sure which one to follow:
- Use a Skybox Panoramic Shader to display 360 degree videos as scene backdrop.
- Put the camera inside a sphere and flip its material’s normals with a special shader.
I tried both and both felt challenging to me, probably because I have no background in development and I am reaching my technical limits. For example, with the first method, the guidelines imply that you have previously imported the shader but I had no idea how to go about importing a shader! It took me a while to figure out that I had to import both the shader and the CS file.
In the end I got there and managed to play the video in Unity. Or sort of. I think it works, but my laptop was not happy playing it back. It’s not a VR-ready machine and it is also reaching its limits. I wanted to build the app and try it in a headset, but I’d need to overcome challenge #2 first. Here is what it looked like in Unity:
Screen capture of my Unity project
Challenge #4: stitching longer files
I have already reported about the stitching process in a previous blog post. I have now stitched all my short files and I am having issues with longer files, mainly those over 6 minutes. The software stops stitching somewhere during the process and there is no way to restart it other that starting all over again and hoping that it will work this time.
I have a few 8-minute long videos that I’m struggling to stitch because of that. Again, it’s probably due to the limitations of my laptop. And I’m actually lucky my longest file is under 9 minutes. It’s actually an upside of my camera overheating and stopping recording on its own, otherwise I’m sure I would have recorded even longer videos!
On the bright side…
To get ready to produce a great 360 film, I have been following the 360/VR Master Series offered by Mettle. Here is how they describe it:
The 360/VR Master Series teaches 360 production workflow, step-by-step, using Mettle SkyBox Suite in Adobe Premiere Pro and After Effects.
This is super helpful to me, as I am new to both Adobe Premiere Pro and the Mettle SkyBox Suite. As always, I just need to take the time to sit down, watch the videos and practice. That’s another time consuming activity. Time is always my main constraint. But I love learning!
So what’s next?
I am still aiming at finishing the 360 short films (2 episodes: Berkeley and Stanford) and create a wrapper VR app for them. I was hoping that keeping the app simple would enable me to build it on my own. That’s been more challenging than I had hoped. I will see if I can get some help, otherwise it will take a long time for me to finish it. I also need more time to edit the 360 films. It seems that I also need to invest in a better computer, as my current laptop is not fit for the job.
Realistically, it’s likely that I will finish all this off after my vacation, i.e. after the Lauch Pad submission deadline. I will keep you all posted…
Now time for a break!
This week we focused on a few different areas: polishing art
assets, adding a few additional assets, and testing/prepping for a build.
We added higher poly-count Passenger models with adorable
features that uses Blendshapes to give them unique expressions. This also
included new animations for the Passengers. Additionally, we added a Train
Conductor with accessories. The Conductor’s Hat is adorable!
We also worked on adding rock meshes, which were then added
to the StartScreen hub. We also started to fill out the hub a little more –
there are now vermin scrambling around, conductors pointing to the train, and
passengers with their luggage waiting for the train. Our goal is to use the hub as an instructive,
no-pressure “Level 1-1.” Our characters in the scene guide the player to how to
play the game and starting the primary gameplay. We want the player to have an
opportunity to understand how to move and interact with the space around them,
without feeling the hand-holding of an aggressive tutorial. We think we’re
close to accomplishing that.
Since things were coming along nicely, I decided to test the
game in the GearVR again. Everything looked super jagged in the headset, so I
updated the Quality Settings in Unity. That made the game look super crisp and
clean in the headset. I also tweaked certain things in the StartScreen hub so
that it felt better in the headset. (Made the Station Depot shorter, resized
the train, moved the camera, etc.) Overall, I felt really good about how the
game looked and felt in the headset.
Since Gabor offered to review builds that are sent his way,
I reviewed what we need to upload to the Oculus store and began the process. I
set up the name and filled out all the information except for uploading a
build. I have a few more things I want to tweak before loading a build, but I
plan on having that done early next week. I also reviewed what Lauren posted
this week of her experience loading her game to the Alpha channel and that
information was super helpful! Gabor’s feedback for Lauren was also really
helpful and I plan on implementing some of it in the game prior to uploading
the build.
OLP Dev Blog 9: CloudRise
Hi friends!
As I promised last week, this week I’ve got a cool visual effect to tell you about that makes it look like a bunch of 3D particle systems are running in the game but they are really 2D movie magic. Cloudrise is set on a gas giant planet and I really wanted the surface to look alive with photorealistic roiling clouds. This kind of effect is not hard to achieve with the Unity standard asset particle systems, but since the game is getting released on GearVR we can’t have a bunch of 3D particle systems running on the phones without seriously overtaxing them. Soooo the work around I ginned up was to create a scene with the surface of the planet exactly how I wanted it with a gazillion particle systems running, put a virtual 360 camera renderer in the middle of the scene (VR Panorama 360 PRO Renderer), captured about 30 seconds of 360 video of the particle systems running, took that 360 video and dumped it onto a video sphere in the scene I wanted the effect in, looped the video, and voila!! Huge 3D particle system background still looks 3D but is now 2D and tiny. How’s that for high level graphics compression B-)
I’m going to monkey around with the 360 videos a bit more (there’s some rendering artifacts when the videos loop) but overall I’m pretty pleased with the effect.
On a less cheery note I am having shader troubles with some of the models that I made in Blender, the textures aren’t mapping to them properly in Unity. I’m not super familiar with the Blender/Unity handshake but I’m pretty sure I need to texture the models in Blender for the UV mapping to be correct in Unity, or something like that. It’s not really mission critical for this demo but you want things to look nice so I’ll keep trying at it. There aren’t a lot of 3D modelers where I live, but I’ll see if I can find someone who can help.
Until next week!
Neil D. Short
Project Title: Achilles Heel
Type: 360
Video Series
Genre:
Sci-Fi Sitcom
OLP17 - Blog 9
This past week was very
productive due to a lot of multitasking, but there's still so much to do, so this will be a short blog (no pun intended :)). The Friday Office Hours call was very informative. I don't like the fact that we're shooting this close to the deadline. So much of the app creation and submission is totally new territory for me, but shooting a narrative story, in 360, on green screen takes a lot of planning and experimenting as well. I have a Unity developer looking into making our container app and the rest of the work is hands-on as we prep for next week's shoot.
Graphic design work on logos continues to be
refined.
We are scheduled to shoot in
the middle of next week so we have been doing a lot camera tests and set building.
Casting is complete, along
with a table read and one rehearsal.
I’m going to be making some
adjustments to the script based on reviewing dailies and my notes from the rehearsal.
Meanwhile, concept art for the environment continues.
Keep on keeping on!
Week 9: Full-time Development + Character Animation Roadblocks
Working on this project has become increasingly difficult without a real budget; however, I've decided to push forward and do as much as I can to complete the demo by the end of Launchpad. With reason, most of my teammates are picking up other projects and responsibilities and, currently, the development team consists of myself and the two new animators. Accordingly, I am pushing in around 10 hours a day at minimum of development. My work consists of creating animations in Maya, developing FX, painting Tilt Brush scenes, creating lip sync animations to procedurally animate the characters, working with Niko on our sound design, managing the output of all team members, and editing and building the experience from front to back in Unity, and much more. While it has been overwhelming and exhausting, it is extremely rewarding. For the first time since the beginning of development nine weeks ago, I now have the first two scenes time-synced and edited. While the character animations are missing, the story is coherent and the interactions are there. I’m thinking to bring in some play testers to check whether my interactions are natural or not. I’m very excited to see what’s to come. For next week, I plan to:
- Complete Tilt Brush paintings
- Add Haptics to currently made interactions
- Figure out how to best integrate and work with the animations in the scene.
- Hone sound design
- Add non-linearity to scenes 3-5
Besides the progress made this week, the only major roadblock I am concerned about is our character animations. Our rigs have caused many problems and are still being re-rigged according to new skin weights. Additionally, the animators still haven’t started on final animations for the scenes, which I’m afraid may not get in the experience in time.
Crossing my fingers!
