That visit to try out PlayStation VR turned out pretty successful. I was able to experience it and didn’t walk away really miserable. That’s success in my book. That’s about the biggest success of the week to be honest. I didn’t get much art done even at the weekend.
About the only thing I made progress on was getting Mental Ray for 3DS Max 2018 installed. The download was a bit funny. It started out saying it was going to take 3 hours for 300 MB. It didn’t. It took less than an hour. The install was really quick. No fuss, no muss. It installed it’s plugins right where they were supposed to go. That’s cool since I install most everything on a different drive from my C: drive. I haven’t had much of a chance to work with it yet. I just opened 3DS Max 2018 to see if Mental Ray was there now and to check things out in the Slate Material Editor to see if all the options where there. They were. Cool.
I guess this answers my dilemma as to what to do with Funkatmyer. It looks like I’m going to try moving Funkatmyer from Maya to 3DS Max 2018 and work with him there. I may want to look for a newer rigging tutorial for 3DS Max. Just in case there are some new shortcuts or a little easier way to go about rigging. Oh. I’m going to need to get on that. Ok. And I’ll want to bring Walter over to 3DS Max. At least so he can be in the picture for the card. Fortunately, his rig is fairly simple. It might move with him. If it does, awesome. If not then I guess I’ll remake it.
Nice. So while I’m not quite on the track and ready to go for the Christmas card, I’m at least at the station. It’s progress. Small but progress.
Back to my VR trial. That was fun. I didn’t expect to last as long as I did in it. I really expected to start feeling uncomfortable after just a little bit but I didn’t. There is this fun little game for the Autonots or whatever they are called, cute little robot things that are in the PlayStation Playroom. Anyway, there is a game that you have to rescue a bunch of them. I had fun with that. It’s really cute. I did start to have a little issue after I did too much jumping. But I stopped doing that and backed off for a moment and was able to continue other parts of it. So that’s cool.
I also got to try a diving experience thing. It was ok. There were things about it that reminded me of EPCOT in Florida. The Living Seas exhibit with all the man made rocks and coral. That was my impression of this underwater experience when closer to the surface. Farther down, where the light was not as good, the illusion worked better. Though there was a rope on the metal cage that bugged me.
We tried out TEKKEN 7 but it isn’t really a virtual reality compatible game. There is a VR mode but it’s not like being one of the fighters in the game. What I did get to try out that was very VR was Star Trek Bridge Crew. I didn’t get to play for long and we did take quite a long time trying to figure out how to give commands. But once you get the hang of it, it’s not too bad. It is a pretty good VR experience for that.
All in all the VR tryout thing was a success. My course of study in college was in VR, quite 
a while ago, and my experiences since then had led me to feel that I was not going to be able to experience it at all, or at least not comfortably. Now, I have to admit, I’m looking at it again. I am considering picking up a VR headset, I’m just not sure if it will be PlayStation or something else. But that all starts to get into a different discussion.
For now, I will get back to working on Funkatmyer and Walter and the Christmas Card and finish studying for my test for the day job. I’m close. I’m actually going to book the test this week to take next week. I’ll sure be glad to have that done. I will need a little play time in between studying and now that I have a plan, there might be more to show and tell on the 3D art front next week so come back and find out.