Has virtual reality changed the way you make 3D art?

corc0

Hey! I'm a programmer, not an artist, and I just spent the last few months supporting the development of a tiny (and, finally, published!) VR title.

We're a two-person team, and neither one of us had loads of experience in the visual side of game development. So, I guess I'm looking to expand my horizons a bit... have VR-based tools changed the way you make art? Do VR games call for different models/shaders? Or are things more or less the same?

gnoop

About tools working in VR if it's what you are asking about.   

Content creation tools themselves  even decades later after their initial born  are still monstrously inconvenient and showing very little if any sign of getting better, more logical or elegant.

You spend a life digging through its utter mess usually.    

Adding to all that hassle a huge square thing  on your head , no way sorry.    Would be a little hard to hit your head against a wall  I think  

Obscura

Its pretty much the same. Pixel shaders are more expensive due to the bigger resolution overall.

poopipe

Fundamentally it's the same.  there are no genuinely useful VR content creation tools outside of the layout and visualisation stages so vr itself doesn't really affect asset pipelines. 

If you're doing VR properly (ie making an effort to stop people puking)  then there is a significant impact on the details of how things need to be implemented.  This seems to be brushed under the carpet by most developers (probably because they aren't prepared to spend the money my last studio did on 'human trials') 

corc0

gnoop said:

Content creation tools themselves  even decades later after their initial born  are still monstrously inconvenient and showing very little if any sign of getting better, more logical or elegant....

Adding to all that hassle a huge square thing  on your head , no way sorry.    Would be a little hard to hit your head against a wall  I think  

poopipe said:

Fundamentally it's the same.  there are no genuinely useful VR content creation tools outside of the layout and visualisation stages so vr itself doesn't really affect asset pipelines.

Ah. I'm not surprised - so much in VR seems like a proof of concept more than a fully-functioning tool - but I'm kinda bummed. The problem of the "huge square thing on your head" is real...

poopipe said:

If you're doing VR properly (ie making an effort to stop people puking)  then there is a significant impact on the details of how things need to be implemented.  This seems to be brushed under the carpet by most developers (probably because they aren't prepared to spend the money my last studio did on 'human trials') 

I think we got away with this for a while by embracing more restrictive forms of movement (blink-based snap-turn, slow-walking) and vision (really, really dark environments). We were lucky to have a premise (horror in a dusky hedge maze) that didn't call for more... this time

So: setting aside nausea management and the added expense of some shaders... things haven't changed much. Good to know. Thanks for the education!

poopipe

yeah, movement is the big one - ours was a (fast)  full freedom FPS  with a lot of verticality (because why make life easy)

some thoughts... 
The main thing that affects how believable an environment seems is how consistent the scale of things is at every level of detail.  That leads into comfort too - if your brain believes the environment is plausible you're less likely to puke on your shoes.  This doesn't mean you have to make everything realistic scale, just that it needs to be consistent. 

It is well worth using the headset for reviewing layouts and getting a feel for the space your in and using apps like tiltbrush can help a lot with  concepting and design work - its a very fluid way to start feeling out how big spaces want to be etc.  

jStins

It definitely helps to be 'VR Native' when doing early blockout and layout work. Unity has EditorXR which I've found really useful for blocking out environments in VR. I like that you can easily bring in stuff that you know is accurate scale and build around that. It also alleviates the need to constantly go between the headset and desktop when you're iterating quickly. I have a separate Unity project that I use for EditorXR stuff and then port those blockouts to the main project. I think UE4 has something similar if you're not using Unity? 

But yeah, once it comes to actual production work, not much different except needing to optimize a bit more aggressively.