Personal Observations/Progress
- Attended Siggraph this week and overall really enjoyed it. The last Siggraph I attended was in 1998 I believe. Lots of VR focus this year, as to be expected and given that the crowd wasn't too large, I was able to experience a wide variety of projects and seminars. I'll try to put my notes into some sort of cohesive form and will share them within the OLP Facebook group. Unity had its own theater where they ran different workshops each day. There were even a few familiar faces like Sarah Stumbo who ran a workshop on XR Development in Unity. (BTW XR is just the acronym assigned to AR/VR/MR/ etc. I didn't know this until later ;-)
Some of the cool things I saw and got to experience at Siggraph 2017 include: Controlling object with my mind while in a VR environment, Seeing a Unity pro demo Timeline and Post Processing in the booth for about 15-20 minutes, watching Floyd Norman be interviewed as the featured Keynote guest and seeing all the advancements in computer graphics from realtime rendering to AI driven talk shows.
Production Progress
- Ongoing Task: Camera Movement
Although I was gone much of the week for Siggraph, I still managed to get some time behind the screen in the evenings. I continued working on my camera flythrough and tweaking the motion settings. This has proved to be very time consuming and ultimately I had to change the layout of the setting, in order to remove some of the turns and curves. The challenge I've run into is making the camera turn slowly and smoothly, without the potential for making one nauseous. Also, with the movement too slow, the piece can get boring very quickly. There is a real trick to getting the camera movement just right.
Task: Build Out Scene Transitions and Loading
Initially, I ran into a bit of a challenge in trying to get the scenes to fade out as I loaded the next scene, but ultimately this was resolved with an Asset Store plugin that works beautifully. I am fading out one scene and moving to a 'staging' scene as the next one loads. It took me a little while to get this system set up and working the way I'd intended, but I eventually it worked and it works quite well. Fortunately, this feature only took about a day to resolve and I've been able clear this from the list!
Task: Output First Standalone Build
After the Open Office Hours call on Friday, my goal was to build my project in its current state and see how well it ran and what the file size was. Well, I ran into a bunch of issues. The first time I initiated a build, Unity halted on several errors before any compiling began.
Turns out, there were a few shaders that weren't compatible with 5.6.3 and a few other scripts. Fortunately, I was able to track down the culprits and delete them without any affect on the project. (TIP: If you run into compiler errors, always check for dependencies and references in ALL of your scenes. If none show up, then you should remove the script and see if it solves the error.) Unfortunately, buying plugins on the Unity Asset Store can be a roll-of-the-dice sometimes. Even if something was tested on Unity 5, it doesn't mean it will work with the latest version of Unity. Also, there may be conflicts with other scripts or plugins which may reference code with the same name. (This has happened to me several times.) Anyway, after tracking down the bad code and shaders, my project still wouldn't build! It would get to the end of the compile and Unity would crash. So, I finally did some Google digging on the issue I was experiencing and it turns out that the Oculus Developer plug ins were the problem. (I'm not faulting Oculus here, but pointing out that the version I had was likely an older version or was not installed properly.) After deleting the OVR packages, the project finally compiled and output my first build!