Technical challenges so far..
When working with Google cardboard you allways need to take on consideration the raw processing power of mobile devices, and be wise on how to distribute tasks, in this Blog I will be discussing by sections what challenges I faced this past two week..
- Main Screen:
The Main screen was not a challenge, but it was an interesting start point to understand the Google cardboard Hyerarchy when it comes to UI, for example the Google cardboard gaze input has two ways of interacting with game objects, one dternines if it is interacting with an graphic element (A button), the other uses the raycaster to check if the object you are interacting with is an interactable 3D model.
- Still Images section:
At first in this section my approach was to create a scene for sphere and change scenes by clicking the menu, however this makes you have to wait longer to jump for one scene to the next and I wasnt feeling confortable about having to wait for long when loading it in the mobile.
My seccond approach did not work better, this time I decided to create 6 bubbles and swith cameras… This was a mess, loading times were hughe and it was harder to organize all my items and make sense of the scene, Then I tried to change the material everytime but the shader that change the vertex normals of my spheres did not accepted a change in the color of the material.. (or something like that.. I am still confussed).
So finally I recurred to the idea of creating the spheres, by then having the camera to change position with a script and discovered that I did not work before because before moving the camera of thegoogle cardboard you needed to place it in a empty object so it works like a tripod (Yeah!… still confussed about that too… Sigh!)
- The Video section:
The video had to be stitched in the propietary software provided by Samsung and the software was a bit simple so I had to take the video somewhere else (Unity) to reduce the resolution and do other chnages here and there. I took me like a week to understand why the video was playing in my pc but not in my mobile and the answer was that the movie texture mesh doesnt get along with google cardboard, so you need to make some changes before it runs properly.
The activity section:
ANd finally this last week has been all about organizing assets for the animated section, so I can make them have the least polygon count possible so they can be used in a google cardboard device.
First I learned how to construct the bones, build controlers to rig and skin a hand in 3ds max, and learned techniques to take 3D models I found online and clean them with different tools for a better performance, next week we will tak about the animation.
