Personal Observations/Progress
- Unable to log into the Launchpad forum. When I attempt to go to the thread I get a permission denial page: https://forums.oculus.com/developer/categories/launch-pad-2017
- After getting and setting up the Rift, I've become really partial to it now. I'd love to build my project for the Rift ultimately, as I see it would allow me to take advantage of the proper lighting, textures and shaders to create the world I'm envisioning. Perhaps I'll start with the Rift to generate my tests and work to lower the graphics bar for the Gear VR. It's much easier to view and output on the Rift, given it's hooked directly to my PC.
- Researched various sources for funding including banks, VC's and seed round investors. Planning to attend a VR/AR funding workshop at Fox on Tuesday.
Production Progress
Task 1: Creation of the Angel Models
Reached out to various modelers and artists on Sketchfab and ArtStation for concept artwork and modeling collaboration. Got a few initial responses, but most of them were busy and not taking on new projects. Will extend my search a bit further and eventually post as a task on Unity Connect.
Task: Complete an initial VR test project (Unity or Oculus)
On Tuesday I did my first VR test in Unity which was AMAZING! I took elements from a previous project and cobbled together a test environment which seemed to work very well. I spent the rest of the week making adjustments, optimizations and tweaks to the scene. A few initial learnings:
- The camera (if not using OVR cam) must be attached to a parent GameObject or it won't render to the Rift. After reading a few posts, I learned that the Rift must have full control of the camera with every frame, which makes sense. However, the camera Path system I was using was now useless, but I found another solution for smoothly moving the camera through my scene.
- Lighting is REALLY different in VR from how it's represented on the monitor. I'll need to see if there is a plugin that replicates the VR view on screen, so I don't have to keep jumping back-and-forth from goggles to Unity editor. In general, things were much darker and higher in contrast. After tweaking for a few hours, I think I've figured out a relational handicap. In Unity, the scene should be a little more "washedout" in terms of color and light, which ends up looking okay in VR.
- Wind and particle effects seem to work smoothly with no framerate drops. I haven't collected and compared any data yet, but I was surprised that the scene ran relatively smoothly.
- Camera height is very tricky, especially if the camera is on a path system. Without a character controller type setup, I had to just guestimate the proper height for the camera, which took a few iterations, but ultimately I figured it out.
Overall, I was very pleased with my initial VR test on the rift. I'll continue to shape this test environment until it resembles the "non-VR" concept I had. There is a lot of scale and positioning work to do within the scene, so that things have the proper proportions. It's been fun though!