Story Design - Tech Art Solutions to our VR Environment

This week we split tasks up between 2D art, 3D art, and VR implementation.

I focused specifically on the issues we were encountering with the lighting and navigational mesh problems in our VR space, and how to correct them for a second pass.

In our first week, we would try baking our lighting information into the scene and see our shadows rendering in a very abstract/distorted fashion.

As you can see the tree shadows on the back wall are losing the geometry of the shapes casting them.
After looking through the different factors contributing to our current light setup I changed a few things to correct this distortion.

One of the largest factors contributing to this was the shadow map resolutions of our proxy structure walls. Being a temporary setup, walls were established by stretching default cubes to a desired size. This meant that the normal resolution for shadow information remained static, as the size of the geometry would be expanded 2-3 times larger. I needed to increase the shadow map resolution for the geometry that would be catching our shadow information to regain the proper shapes of the objects blocking the light.

The results were noticeable.

We can see this a little more clearly indoors:

You can see the difference when we look in to the light properties of this wall that catches the statue's shadows at a lower resolution like 256

After overriding the light map resolution and cranking it up to match the general scale of the wall, we can see the shadows being rendered at a shape that much more accurately matches that of the object casting the shadow.

After the light map resolution changes, I set out to make a secondary precaution to lighting problems that occur whenever you shine a light through a translucent object. (Specifically our glass dome)

Going into the glass material for our dome, I changed the shading model parameter to "unlit" essentially canceling a conflict between lighting interactions with our glass dome and our directional light when trying to reach the internal geometry. Our dome no longer has lighting information coming from it to conflict with the play space inside of it.

One final problem that we encountered last week was with our Nav Mesh that forced a really broken VR teleport system. After investigating the problems with Alexis Damron, we found that we had 2 navigational meshes colliding between our indoor and outdoor environments.

We deleted the secondary Nav Mesh and expanded the original to cover the entire playvspace to simplify the movement system for our second week proxy showcase.

My plans next week will focus on lighting our 2nd revision environment, once our 3D team has imported it, and creating the toon-shading system for our spiritual characters.