Materials for VR?

salimmatta

Hey guys,
Is there anything I should take into consideration when creating materials(inst) for an VR game?

(its my first project in VR)
Thanks

Obscura

Yes. As VR uses higher resolution, you use more pixels per material, so they become more expensive. You should keep your materials as simple as possible. Parallax can become very heavy for example, especially if its applied on many things.

salimmatta

Thanks a lot Obscura, you always reply to my posts

poopipe

 Contrast is a big a comfort issue,  not just in terms of albedo - specular aliasing can be particularly unpleasant (especially with bloom etc) and anything that falls to full black in shadow will fuck with depth perception and potentially lead to nausea etc. 

Noise is bad,  it messes with depth perception, which leads to nausea

You need to be careful of the sort of patterns you use to decorate surfaces,  strobing is an obvious thing to avoid  but you can take also advantage of horizontal lines to calm and smooth transitions between areas, along corridors etc.  It's basic environment art theory but everything is an order of magnitude more impactful when the player is actually in it. 

The other big thing to consider is consistency of scale (and by proxy, texel density) .  You can't get away with stretching UVs on a brick wall or using the same paving slabs at wildly different sizes because it looks even shitter than it would normally and wrecks your sense of presence.

Its worth mentioning that literally everything you do will make someone, somewhere feel sick.
To be safe,  work in grayscale with a tonal range between about 25 and 75% and start gently introducing colour where its important.