Category / Unity3D

by dshah1120

My Experience Working Out At-Home During the Global COVID-19 Outbreak

At first glance, this post might sound pedantic, for comprehensive info on the Corona Virus visit the WHO Q&As or CDC. This post is in regard to immunological fitness and how the virus is spread and my personal method of using virtual reality as an additional form of exercise:

The disease can spread from person to person through small droplets from
 the nose or mouth which are spread when a person with COVID-19 coughs or 
exhales. These droplets land on objects and surfaces around the person. 
Other people then catch COVID-19 by touching these objects or surfaces, 
then touching their eyes, nose or mouth


source: https://www.who.int/news-room/q-a-detail/q-a-coronaviruses

For the above reason, gyms and other typically crowded workout facilities are out. However, exercise is still a key part of staying healthy, more on this further down. I’ve been using an at-home workout strategy using virtual reality for over two weeks and I’d like to share why this is working for me.

TLDR

If you own a VR headset; some titles that could be used for cardio are:

- Beat Saber
- Box VR
- OhShape
- Thrill of the Fight
- Synth Riders
- Creed: Rise to Glory
- Until You Fall

Active titles that can be modified to be more of a workout:

- Rec Room
- RacketNX
- Pistol Whip
- Lone Echo
- Superhot VR

For general standing activity to afford you some low intensity movement:

- Racket Fury
- Sports Scramble
- VRChat

Virtual reality is a little known option for folks as it relates to fitness, but now we know at my company YUR that thousands of people use VR games daily to workout in a fun and efficient way. The big difference is that while wearing a VR headset you are completely immersed in playing the role of a player in a game. It’s important to note that this trend towards immersive fitness is visible with Peloton, Les Mills, and other fitness names.

YUR monthly view

My month so far has been characterized by workouts between 250 kcals and 750 kcals as you can see, every day (except for March 4th). I’ll tend to use games such as Box VR or Beat Saber, and with YUR the cool part about this is any game can be played and tracked which allows for constant novelty the moment you feel bored of your current exercise regime. This doubles as a benefit if you are feeling cooped up at home.

… with YUR any game can be played and tracked which allows for constant novelty the moment you feel bored of your current exercise regime

I would characterize the kind of workouts I do in VR as plyometric, and explosive in nature similar to a HIIT workout. However, this is up to your personal preference.

As a perennial gym-goer, I have to point out here what VR workouts are not providing me and others. Hypertrophic or strength benefits from lifting weights, cycling, rowing, calisthenics, and running are all different from VR workouts.

So how does staying immunologically fit factor into this as well as COVID-19? I’m not posing a risk to others (as long as I am the only one using my VR headset). By doing this I’m participating in a community.

To be immunologically fit, you need to be physically fit. “White blood 
cells can be quite sedentary,” says Akbar. “Exercise mobilises them by increasing your blood flow, so they can do their surveillance jobs and seek
 and destroy in other parts of the body.” The NHS says adults should be 
physically active in some way every day, and do at least 150 minutes a week 
of moderate aerobic activity (hiking, gardening, cycling) or 75 minutes of 
vigorous activity (running, swimming fast, an aerobics class).

`source: https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2020/mar/08/how-to-boost-your-immune-system-to-avoid-colds-and-coronavirus`

So basically, in the middle of my day between 1 pm or 6 pm, I throw my Oculus Quest on and workout for maybe half an hour or so. I hope that this has been insightful to you and if you have a VR headset perhaps this can factor into your virus response.

This post initially appeared on my Linkedin.

by dshah1120

Design Iteration for Oculus Go

 

Design iteration when building for the Oculus Go

With 6 degrees of freedom headsets like the Oculus Rift and HTC Vive, when working in Unreal or Unity3d, it takes only a push of the play button to test your application in the headset.

There are advantages to seeing your scene from within your headset such as how your first-person perspective is developing, checking performance metrics in HUD, checking in on rendering weirdness, or correcting for relative spacing. However, the constraint of having to deploy by building and running to the Oculus Go each time we needed to check something can lessen your appetite for quick checks like this. Besides, sometimes is not even necessary.

That’s why a quick way of iterating on your scene using traditional desktop inputs is nice. Typically duplicating a currently under-construction scene into two versions. One called “site tour” for example and another called “site tour desktop”. The naming convention splits up functionality so that when you need to test something using mouse and keyboard you quickly hop into the “site tour desktop” scene. Some example mappings include UI navigation with a pointer or locomotion. The UI navigation can be done using the left mouse button and cursor instead of shipping to Go and using the hand controller. The locomotion can be done using your keys ‘w’,’a’,’s’, and ‘d’, as is common to most FPS games, to move around the space and the mouse to click and drag to move your head instead of having to teleport.

Diving deeper on the locomotion example

By throwing on headphones and using a Fly script applied to the Main Camera to test quickly using WASD within the Unity editor, you’ll be able to check relevant aspects of your lighting, audio, animations, etc without needing to wear the Go.
sample:

void Update()
{

    if (Input.GetMouseButton(0))
{
yaw += Input.GetAxis(“Mouse X”) * lookSpeed;
pitch += Input.GetAxis(“Mouse Y”) * lookSpeed;
pitch = Mathf.Clamp(pitch, -90.0f, 90.0f);
}

transform.localRotation = Quaternion.AngleAxis(yaw, Vector3.up);
transform.localRotation *= Quaternion.AngleAxis(pitch, Vector3.left);

transform.position += transform.forward * moveSpeed * Input.GetAxis(“Vertical”);
transform.position += transform.right * moveSpeed * Input.GetAxis(“Horizontal”);
transform.position += transform.up * 3 * moveSpeed * Input.GetAxis(“Mouse ScrollWheel”);

}

For the purposes of testing out spatial audio, I’ve noticed it’s great––mimicking head movement by panning using the mouse x.

 

​

Turning to the Oculus Rift

For what it’s worth in a post that’s supposed to be about the Oculus Go design iteration loop. In progress with an Oculus Go app currently, I and a friend find the utility of swapping a project over to the Oculus Rift to be really helpful.

What this does for you is, allow you to take advantage of the Oculus Rift during Play Mode (in Unity) which gives way to much faster iteration time. Perfect for quick fixes to code and cohesion of various parts (for example, like Teleportation and UI).

by dshah1120

Rapid Worldbuilding with Probuilder

Rapid Worldbuilding with ProBuilder

ProBuilder is totally free available through the package manager.
If you’re using 2017 or 5.6 you’ll get critical bug fixes. However, from 2018 onwards there’s more support, using 2018.1.0b3 I dealt with a considerably severe crash bug, so update to b12 IMO.
Polybrush and Progrids are things you’ll have to go get individually from Unity.
To replace Probuilder objects with polished geo you can play around with the Unity FBX exporter

Real Quick Prototyping Demo

  • Main Probuilder window (found by going to tools>probuilder>probuilder window) – has tools and Probuilder is designed so that you can ignore it when you’ a new to using Probuilder
  • Face, Object, etc. mode – will allow you to touch only the variable selectable
  • A good way to learn the tool is to go through the main probuilder window and check the shortcuts
  • It really helps to keep things as simple as possible from the get go. Don’t add tons of polys
  • Shape selector will help you quickly make stuff
  • Connect edges and insert edge loop
  • Holding shift to grab multiple
  • ‘R’ will give you scale mode
  • Extrude is a fantastic way to add geometry
  • Grid Size – keep at 1 for 1 meter this is important for avoiding mistakes when creating geo and knowing your angles
  • Use the ortho top down view to see if your geo fits your grid
  • Detach face settings is a way to split geo selected but it’s still part of your item
  • Detach face using a different setting to create a new game object
  • Pivot point needs to be rejigged often (solutions: object action or set it to a specific element using “Center Pivot”)
  • center pivot and put it on the grid by using progrids
  • Settings changes become the default
  • Use the Poly Shape tool to spin up a room + extrude quickly
  • Merge objects
  • think in terms of Quads
  • try selecting to vertices and connect (Alt + E) them
  • select hidden as a toggle is a great option, because in 3D you are seeing an orthographic projection so you will click on the thing that is drawn closest to the camera!
  • Crafting a doorway, can be done using extrude and grid meter changes, toggle the views (X, Y, and Z) to help with that
  • hold v to make geo snap; this will save you time later on
  • Alt+C will collapse verts (as in the ramp option where the speaker started with a cube)
  • Weld vs. Collapse — weld great for merging to hallways, or collapse which is more like pushing all verts within a specific distance together
  • Grow selection and smooth group

Polybrush Stuff

  • Add more detail with loops or subdivide (smart connect)
  • Polybrush will let you sculpt, smooth, texture blend, scatter objects, etc.
  • Modes like smoothing
  • todo explore something prefabs
  • N-gons are bad because everything is made up of tris

Texturing stuff

Open up the UV editor
  • By default, everything is on auto which means that on in-scene handles toggle
  • When you’re prototyping this allows you to not use fancy toolbar stuff

Question

  • Why is progrids helpful? Short answer: if you’re not super familiar with 3D modeling and creation software (i.e. Maya) you can create simple geo without leaving Unity editor.
  • Why would you be obsessive about making sure your geo fits your 1 meter grid size? Short answer: This helps you avoid errors with geo creation such as horrid angles and hidden faces.
  • Can you talk a little bit about automation with Probuilder?
by dshah1120

Reblog: 3 ways to draw 3D lines in Unity3D

Just as I was thinking about an interesting demo to play with drawing functions in Unity3D, Mrdoob published his Harmony drawing tool made with HTML5/Canvas. It looks really cool, so I though how about doing this in 3D? I only had to figure out how to draw lines.

I did some research and below I present 3 different solutions. You can grab the source of the examples discussed below here.

Drawing lines with Line Renderer [demo]

When it comes to lines, the first thing you’ll bump into in the Unity3D API is the Line Renderercomponent. As the name suggests, it is used to draw lines so it seems the right tool for the job. Lines in this case are defined by 2 or more points (segments), a material and a width.

It has an important limitation: the line must be continuous. So if you need two lines, you need two renderers. The other problem is that the Line Renderer acts very strangely when new points are added dynamically. The width of the line does not seem to render correctly. It’s either buggy or just wasn’t designed for such use. Because of these limitations I had to create a separate Line Renderer for each tiny bit of line I’m drawing.

It was easy to implement, but not very fast since I end up spawning lots of GameObjects each with a LineRenderer attached. It seems to be the only option if you don’t have Unity3D Prothough.

Drawing lines as a mesh using Graphics [demo]

The Graphics class allows to draw a mesh directly without the overhead of creating game objects and components to hold it. It runs much faster than Line Renderer, but you need to create the lines yourself. This is a bit more difficult but also gives you total control of the lines – their color, material, width and orientation.

Since meshes are composed of surfaces rather than lines or points, in 3D space a line is best rendered as a very thin quad. A quad is described with 4 vertices, and usually you’ll only have the start and end points and a width. Based on this data you can compute a line like this:

Vector3 normal = Vector3.Cross(start, end);
Vector3 side = Vector3.Cross(normal, end-start);
side.Normalize();
Vector3 a = start + side * (lineWidth / 2);
Vector3 b = start + side * (lineWidth / -2);
Vector3 c = end + side * (lineWidth / 2);
Vector3 d = end + side * (lineWidth / -2);

First, you get the normal of the plane on which both start and end vectors lie. This will be the plane on which the line-quad will located. The cross product of the normal and of the difference between end and start vectors gives you the side vector (the “thin” side of the quad). You need to normalize it to make it a unit vector. Finally calculate all 4 points of the rectangle by adding the side vector multiplied by half width to both start and end points in both directions. In the source code all this happens in MakeQuad and AddLine methods, so take a look in there.

It wasn’t easy to implement, but once I was there it runs pretty fast.

Direct drawing with GL [demo]

No fast is fast enough! Instead of leaving this topic and live happily with the Graphics solution, I kept searching for something even better. And I found the GL class. GL is used to “issue rendering commands similar to OpenGL’s immediate mode”. This sounds like fast, doesn’t it? It is!

Being much easier to implement that the Graphics solution it is a clear winner for me, the only drawback being that you don’t have much control over the appearance of the lines. You can’t set a width and perspective does not apply (i.e. lines that are far behind look exactly the same as those that are close to the camera).

Conclusion

For massive & dynamic line drawing LineRenderer is not the best solution, but it is the only one available in Unity free version. It can surely be useful to draw limited amounts of static lines and this is probably what it was made for. If you do have Unity3D Pro, the solution with Graphics is reasonable and very flexible but if it is performance you’re after choose GL.

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