Archives for October 2019

Poly Reduction for VR

October 30, 2019 by awf5212 Leave a Comment

When it comes to VR experiences, a major concern in development is maintaining a high frame rate. When the framerate dips bad with VR, players are more likely to experience motion sickness and other issues. To avoid this, things within the experience need to be optimized for performance. A major section of optimization is controlling polygon counts on objects.

An object that is 1.76 million triangles could certainly run in VR, but it would choke out many other aspects of the experience and leave little room for other aspects. We’re working on a project involving a rocket model with such a high poly-count, so I’ve spent the past few weeks on reducing the model as much as I could while retaining important details. Over all the reduction I did, I’ve brought it from around 1.76 million tris to about 93 thousand.

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Implementation and Issues with Human Avatars

October 25, 2019 by awf5212 Leave a Comment

I’ve spent the past week (not counting a few previous days of experimenting) working on getting a fairly simple human avatar into Unity for use in some Virtual Field Trips. The idea was to just use Reallusion’s Character Creator (CC) to make a basic character, modify them in Maya and apply some motion captured animations for use in Unity. Easy to say, much harder to do. Here I’m going to discuss the various steps and pitfalls encountered over the process to hopefully illustrate the difficulties and lay some groundwork to better implement characters in the future.

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Canned Camera

October 3, 2019 by awf5212 Leave a Comment

Camera setup with points for panning, zooming and rotation.

A small prefab I put together for the ChoroPhronisis group. They wanted a simple camera they could drop into their scenes and just let run through some basic camera motions while using OBS to record the screen.

It’s a pretty straightforward script, using a coroutine to run through a sequence of panning the camera, zooming it and rotating it around a point. I added in options for doing these motions while tracking a specific target or just straight copying the rotation of the locators.

Something I hadn’t delved into before that I got some help from Zac Zidick figuring out was using Animation Curves to create smooth acceleration and deceleration within the movement. Essentially, rather than just moving them based on time on it’s own, the time was used to find an evaluated value on the given Animation Curve. While my colleague used a speed value for his animation, I made mine based on a time to complete the motion. Curiously enough, these gave about the same result as it seems the way the speed and time related to the Animation Curve was the same, just in one case it was about multiplying the speed while the other was about dividing the time. With speed being a general movement over time value, this does make sense, just something I never really considered.

Introduction

October 3, 2019 by awf5212 Leave a Comment

Welcome to my new development blog. Hello world and all that jazz.

On this site I’ll be posting updates on various projects I’ve been working on in order to try and develop a better understanding of the trials and tribulations of XR and general interactive development. It will also serve as a reminder of difficult things I’ve figured out so I don’t find myself getting stuck on similar situations. To those that may read this in the future, I hope my posts are informative.