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MikeFesta
MikeFesta
Up and Coming
August 18, 2013

Scale the scene or the camera?

I'm working on my game for the VR Jam (Domino Dash) and trying to figure out the best way to get the camera to scale.

My scene is set up for the default camera scale to work as an overhead camera with a view of the game board for placing dominos. After placement, I want the player to be able to switch to an action camera, putting them on the game board with giant dominos.

With the default camera scaling, the near clipping plane is too large and the eye spacing prevents a sense of scale. My temporary solution has been to scale all of my models by 10x, but it seems like there should be a better way. Anyone have any ideas?
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    boone188
    Up and Coming
    November 9, 2013
    "owenwp" wrote:
    Scaling your scene is usually not really feasible once you have physics involved. Even if you special case everything so that the units stay consistent and none of your constraints break, most physics engines are tuned to keep the numeric precision highest for smallish objects at a 1 unit = 1 meter scale. So significant changes will affect the accuracy of your simulation, sometimes by a lot.

    What I do is apply the world scale of the camera object to the IPD and the neck offset. This way shrinking the player by half also moves the eyes closer together by half. Since stereo disparity is the only way we can measure the size of an object without either having a reference or moving our heads, this will create the effect you want.

    True. In general, It is best to go with the most realistic approach. In this case, it is most realistic for you to shrink and the world to stay the same scale. However, it is important to note that you are probably going to have a more bumpy ride w/r/t Rift integration than those who can stick to the standard scale for the cameras. It shouldn't be that rough though. I would like to make the OVR integration more scale-aware (you could scale everything by simple scaling the camera controller). That wouldn't be too tough. You would just need to make the IPD, etc. relative to the local scaling.
    drash
    Inspiring
    November 9, 2013
    "boone188" wrote:
    However, it is important to note that you are probably going to have a more bumpy ride w/r/t Rift integration than those who can stick to the standard scale for the cameras. It shouldn't be that rough though. I would like to make the OVR integration more scale-aware (you could scale everything by simple scaling the camera controller). That wouldn't be too tough. You would just need to make the IPD, etc. relative to the local scaling.


    You are right about that. This thread describes the minor tweak I usually do when I want to rescale the player (so that the player shrinks and can get really close to things without going cross-eyed). Definitely wouldn't play well with Unity physics, though.
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