During the process from going from a concept to a finished project, you find a lot of obstacles and new opportunities. The concept started as a fishing game where the player would spawn in a virtual mountain lake and have an intractable fishing pole to go fishing with.

This turned out to be much more difficult than I imagined. After using Unity's texture, some trees and grass to make the scene feel populated, not even realistic, the goggles struggled with performance. While laptops and PCs have very powerful chips, the small goggles are quite limited in performance and projects have to be scaled down to accommodate this restriction.

I took inspiration from a real game "Real VR Fishing" which utilized 360 skyboxes of real locations to cut down the number of objects in a scene just to those immediately around the player and the water which is animated. This keeps the performance quite good while maintaining very realistic graphics.

The difficulty I found here was creating a custom shader to make the water blend in with the scene, as well as creating a water object that would blend into the background shore as well as the shore where the perspective is from. This technique is definitely more advanced than I am at this moment so I decided to stick to my other option, hunting.

Hunting allowed me to create a scene that was less intense to make realistic. I was able to use a lot of perspective tricks to make in game objects look like they belong even though they are just floating in virtual space with a background image behind them.

Finally with a scene that I felt was immersive and met the goal of this project I could start making the environment come to life with intractable objects and animated deer

My first challenge was getting all the deer to work. While the asset was pre-made for me, I had to do a lot of work to get the texture to work in Unity as well as combine all the FBX animations that came with the deer in several files into a singular Unity object. This process involved using Blender to create a single FBX file that I could sequence in Unity.

With the animations brought in I applied random start idle animations to the deer in the scene. When the gun is shot in any direction I wrote some code to make all the deer turn to face the same direction and begin running to the left and slightly different random speeds to make it feel more natural.

I also set a condition in the animator that when "hit" is marked, a dying animation occurs and any movement stops occurring including rotations and running which was done in code.

I then went about setting up my rifles. I could not find an asset I was particularly happy with so decided to model a hunting rifle in Blender. I applied a wood texture and metal texture to the appropriate areas and ended up with a nice looking but low enough polycount object. I also later went back and modeled a scope. I could make this work and have a really nice depth affect by adding a circle inside the scope in Blender that inside Unity I apply a render texture to which is the output of a second camera attached to the rifle and with a low FOV to zoom in. I applied a cross hair over it and have a nice realtime scope.

The interactions with difficult and involved a lot of custom codes. I ended up being able to code the trigger and grab buttons on the controllers linking to an animation state tree to blend between the animations provided by Oculus. I added a attach point to the rear of the rifle to make it grabbable and point in the right direction. I then created a fire function which would play my fire sound, trigger the deer to begin running, and send out a raycast to look for hits on deer colliders. I also wanted to make the holding of the gun feel more natural so wrote a custom script to enable two hand holding which is not a default Oculus feature. Two snap points control the objects position and the rotation of the rear hand controls the rotation of the object.

This all culminates in an experience I am happy with as it is realistic and immersive, as well as fun for the user. There is a laundry list of items that could be added to this game such as more scenes, interactions, and water if I knew how to do that, but for the scope of this class and project it came out well and highlights a lot of different aspects of Unity's capabilities.

Outdoors at Home

What is home? When people ask me what my home is like I don’t think of what my bed feels like, my car in the garage, or the color of my house; but rather the Colorado mountains and the time I spend in nature. My home is characterized by what I do outside the house. For this midterm VR project, I want to bring to life something that is close to me and that I am very familiar with, but that is unfortunately out of reach for most people: nature.

The main scene I want to make is a mountain lake. In this scene, users will spawn at a small lake and will have the ability to walk around. Contained in the scene will be first and foremost the lake, surrounded by a rocky pine tree-lined shore with little alcoves to reach the water by a dirt path. This will let the user get down to the water's edge. In the background will be large granite mountains surrounding this lake. There will also be a creek feeding the lake and flowing out from the lake. Here there will be a small footbridge or downed log the user can walk across. The scene will have lots of spatial ambient sounds to make it seem like they are outside.

The player will also have a fishing pole which they will be able to cast into the lake by using the remote. The physical movement of the cast will control the rod, and the trigger on the remote will hold the string to stop it from going out just as it does in real life. I envision either a fly rod or a standard open reel. Depending on how technically challenging it is maybe it would be possible to change out tackle or rods. Once the user casts, eventually a fish will hit and they can set the hook and reel it in with a movement of the remote. Once they land the fish they can hold it up. If time permits this game could be expanded further to either include other scenes such as other bodies of water, or other environments for activities such as shooting and other activities. This will be time permitting as I’d rather focus on making one really strong polished environment than several that are not as complete and immersive.