This assignment will have us create a 360 degree 3D space in which different visual and audio events will all conglomerate into a single immersive experience for the user. During our lab sessions, we have been experimenting with three major tools to help create these environments in which the major production piece will take place in, and learning to utilise them in a more advance manor.
Planning the initial ideas
Thinking very practically, I wanted to make sure that the scene that I will create has the opportunity for many different lighting styles and colour palettes. This also means that I would need a workspace that can incorporate these different aspects into the final render. Using a circular storyboard, I was able to roughly start planning the main focus points for the user that would appear throughout my piece.
Maya
Maya being a more advance tool compared to blender, and where I have the majority of my relevant design experience, has a large array of design tools that I can make use of. Having an extremely flexible amount of lighting options gives me as a developer a much more free reign to design the piece to my desired outcome. With lighting being such an atmospheric part of any scene, I wanted to make sure I followed some key areas when creating my scene. As Kramer, N. (2024) emphasises, some extremely important factors to a 360 VR scene are:
- Space: Making sure the users are aware of their surroundings, and not over designing the area being used
- Navigation: Not making the area too difficult to navigate, and being able to capture as much as possible from the main focal point
- Comfort: Not overusing movement and lighting effects to possible hinder the user’s experience and minimise VR sickness possibilities
Using a 360 degree VR camera in Maya, I am able to encompass the scene in which the user will be immersing themselves into. With this in mind, it does give the option of whether to design the scene to change around the player’s point of view, or to have multiple pre-made rooms that will be made for the player to explore.
Either decision will allow me to use the arnold renderer that is built into the application, which is highly customisable for creating the final scene mp4. Not only will using this rendering method allow me to get a quality finished product, it will also make sure that the image files will be assorted by the image name and image number. Whilst not having much impact on the piece itself, it definitely helps the creation process by increasing its efficiency in finalising.
Blender
My experience with blender before these lab sessions was zero to minimal at best. That said, I shortly found that creating a small scene in blender is also possible for a project of this scale, and has proven to not be too difficult a difficult task. This lab had us creating a simple default cube in a general blender project. Using the render tab, we had to manually change the render engine that would we would be using to the cycles option. Ensuring we had everything setup, we used an equirectangular camera in the centre of the scene and built the environment around our camera.
Its user interface is easy to navigate and offers buckets of variety in terms of forming the environment in which the user will be standing. My main issue with the software, is my limited experience with the tools going forward compared to my knowledge and experience in Maya to create the same project with a more dynamic and flowing atmosphere.
WebVR
We were also challenged to make a brief environment using a web platform known as FrameVR. Using one of the presented pre-set scenes, we could enter a VR world in which we could begin to freely experiment. Whilst not being an application for a photo realistic game scene, its uses are definitely still incredibly versatile. Opposed to creating a game environment in FrameVR, it was more useful at essentially making a 3D portfolio in this situation. We had the ability to incorporate assets and blog posts that we had designed ourselves into these scenes and display in a gallery like format.
Though this application is not commonly used for game and cutscene development, its applications can still be incredibly important. Any company could use this as a medium for people working remotely or even applying for a specific job position as a method of training and preparation. It even has a chance for students to be used in a more an educational scenario, such as making a revision gallery etc. However, I expect not to use it for the main production piece.
References
Kramer, N. (2024) VR Interaction Design: Best Practices & Principles [Blog Post]. daily.dev. 06 June. https://daily.dev/blog/vr-interaction-design-best-practices-and-principles#:~:text=Main%20Ideas%20in%20VR%20Interaction%20Design,-When%20designing%20for&text=Feeling%20present%3A%20Making%20users%20feel,t%20get%20tired%20or%20dizzy [Accessed 16/11/2024]