This week, I continued working on my VR room and completed Section 3 of the Create with VR tutorial, which focused on VR optimization and lighting. This section covered comfort and accessibility, optimization techniques, and lighting, all of which were adjustable based on personal preference. While I found the comfort and accessibility options straightforward, I ran into several challenges with the lighting that I still haven’t fully resolved.
I attempted to use baked lighting in my scene to improve FPS performance and reduce the processing load, as this technique allows static lighting to be precomputed instead of being rendered in real-time. However, even after carefully following the tutorial multiple times, I kept encountering dark spots behind the café counter. The areas where baked lighting worked correctly looked really nice, but since I couldn’t get it to function properly throughout the entire scene, I decided to disable baked lighting for now and use point lights instead. This ensures the room is properly lit, but I know that baked lighting would be more efficient in the long run. If I have time, I plan to revisit this issue and try to get it working, as my VR room is quite large, and optimizing performance is important.
Next week, I plan to start working on my custom interaction, but before jumping into development, I want to research different ways to implement it. To ease myself into coding interactions, I decided to add a functioning clock to my VR room. I found a video tutorial that demonstrated how to create a clock with hours and minutes, but I also wanted to include seconds to make it feel more dynamic and realistic. This proved to be more difficult than I expected, but with Jamie’s help, I managed to get it working correctly. Seeing the clock functioning properly was really satisfying, and it gave me more confidence in tackling more complex interactions in the future.
Overall, this week was a mix of challenges and successes. While the lighting issues were frustrating, completing the clock gave me a sense of accomplishment. I’m looking forward to diving into my custom interaction next week and seeing how I can make my record player feature work in VR.