I’m going to jump right in this week. I’ve already put some fairly intense time in on the VR project and I have quite a bit more to go before I finish it. And as with the last one the textures/materials for it are beating me up pretty good.
After some false starts regarding the topic for my next VR project I finally sat down and went through some alerts that I have set up through Google Alerts and found a topic that I could get enough material on to create a reasonably robust presentation. The next challenge was to figure out how to present the information. What should the venue be? I finally came up with something and spent pretty much all Friday evening building it. Here’s a screen shot from 3DS Max.
Yes there are a few nooks. I intend to put the video in there with some cards outside them denoting what the video is touching on. This time I didn’t try to add any materials from 3DS Max. Since they weren’t going to transport I didn’t think there was a point. At first I thought I’d create my own materials just something basic. But I thought those looked a little plain so I decided to download some materials. I don’t know how many hours I spent trying to find the right ones for what I want. But this is what I’m going for.
That’s all well and good except that those materials won’t show up right in Google Cardboard. Which is what I’m developing this for. The way to get them to show correctly is to bake the lights. They came out pretty ugly when I did that.
And this one, while a little better, is still ugly and easily took two hours to process. It took so long that I was able to make dinner, eat dinner, and work on some art while it was processing. At one point my computer announced I should close some programs
because it was low on memory. And it still looks ugly. Nope, just not working for me.
The only thing that doesn’t look horrible is the rail around the center area. That is the one material I created in Unity. I’ll be keeping that. And it looks like I’m going back to my original plan of creating materials in Unity. I’d just switch one of the materials and a try a test bake, however, if I leave the other materials they are going to look really ugly and likely take just as long to process as before. So it looks like creating all the materials, switching them all out, then crossing my fingers and hoping for the best while they bake.
Who knows, I could get more time to work on the Ovation Guitar painting. That’s what I worked on while the lights were baking and trying to crash my computer. I went from it looking like the first picture to looking like the second one in that time. That’s one way to multi-task.
As you might guess, most of the rest of the week will be taken up with the VR project. First I’ll be fixing the materials. Then I’ve got to get the cards installed, figure out how to setup the navigation, and figure out how to add video. I imagine that in between bits I’ll get to work on the Ovation painting some more. Oh, and some guitar playing. I find it helps to loosen up the hand when it starts to cramp from too much mousing or too much putting dots on canvas. Aside from that, I don’t expect to get to too much more. But I’ll have pictures of the progress for you next week.