It's Alive

Sure, they can be funny at times, (or not depending on your personal views) but to jump on in there and interact could be fun. Hang with the characters in VR instead of just a one-shot snapshot of them in action. The undertaking is not going to be a light lift but the first character import (aBitOWhit) to Unity and animations seems to have worked quite well. I will probably have a few "normal" corrections so that all of the faces are correct, but other than that I believe they will work. Since I have built props for the cartoons they should be a straight import but may require some optimizing for performance. That is all I have for right now and I will post more here in the blogs before I put anything up on the ADIIT book pages. Unfortunately, mother nature has different plans and has blown a tree over, taking out my power lines so it is time to head up to the hardware store to purchase a new insulator which was ripped from the wall outside.. ugh.. 12/13/2021 Power has been restored, generated is put away, back to the game. I imported a few models into the game to create a cubicle based office. Imports seemed to work fine however launching the game on the Oculus 2 resulted in being placed in the office and no movement. This reminded me that I have to also import the oculus integration. I am doing that as I am typing this. For some reason the sample offered by Unity does not work flat out on a build. Possibly they are expecting that you are smart enough to include the oculus integration.. heh. The install contains a rash of choices but instead of selecting all, I am going to attempt to only select a minimal amount which I had used in the past. It appears that was the issue. After installing the Oculus integration using "Windows/Package Manger", deleting the current player controller and dragging and dropping the OVRPlayerController under Assets /Oculus/VR/Prefabs I am now able to build/deploy and go into the game with movement via the Oculus controllers. Now that I have it working I will scale the office down to the correct size, add some props and additional characters and see what comes of it. I spent a good part of today exporting the existing props into fbx files but I am seeing where I forgot to set the loc/rot/scale so the don't behave as they should. Not a big deal but it is time consuming. I also need to work on building some materials. The probs were mostly generic and only a few actually had materials created with any normal mapping. Added a few more characters but still need to work on some of the normals.. they are reversed. I was however able to organize, set loc-rot-scale on the ones that were missing it. I am going to break it into male/female in blender files so that I can keep them somewhat seperated. After a while, blender was filling up and slow to export to fbx. I did however discover that at some point in time I had turned on auto keying which meant that every single object had an animation link with movements. That is a huge disk space waist and will have to go through and remove them. I was wondering why Blender was slowing down so much... ugh. I should be able to start writing some code soon now that I know minimally that the character imports seem to be ok. 12/15/2021 I realize that if you made it easy that everyone could do it, but it seems way too complicated to get the controllers and/or hand tracking working. It seems like I go through this every time. I don't believe the end results are overly complicated but it always seem like you start over every time. By the time you get it working you don't want to finish doing the game.. ugh. This is also why I never mind paying for a game, I realize how much work goes into building one of them. I have cheated however by purchasing Polygon Office by Synty. They really make me realize how lacking I am at modelling. (Probably because there is no toxic glue like the models I made as a child) I really like their model stock that comes with the Polygon Office package and because it is pretty much the complete office I was looking for, it saves me some time. The low poly kind of blends in nicely with the low poly adiit chars. I loaded the default scene (image above) just for playing around and the characters seem to blend in nicely. I did have to scale them slightly but no big deal. The fish particles in the fish tank were swimming around freely in space so I added a few extra box colliders to keep them in their tank. :) I am playing with a few more sample scenes from unity to try and get the hands working or worst case use the controller inputs. Preferably I would like to just have hand tracking and skip controllers altogether because it just seems to flow nicer in the other games I have tried. 12/15/2021(update again) Sometimes it is better to start over from scratch.. that is what I did.. well worth it. I exported from my grabbable app cholexr. Started a brand new vr project template. Imported cholexr source into new project. Imported Polygon Office again. Created a new scene. Cut and pasted parts I wanted including the vr controller. All is working. Fixed fish. Added grabbable objects, including billiard balls for testing. Tomorrow, will import ADIIT characters again and I should be good. Now I just need to think of some things to do in the game. Happy Days. More this week hopefully... vacation passes too quickly.