A VR Geek's Blog During last week-end, along with six fellow VRGeeks, we participated in the Global Game Jam 2013 for some non-professional VR fun. While the four other VRGeeks created two other teams, I teamed with Judith Guez to work on an idea that was in my head for quite some time: create an efficient escape room in VR. The theme this year was the sound of a heart beat. We decided to use a candle as a metaphore for the heart beat. (But the focus changed a bit during the jam.) We were quickly joined by two 3D artists, one sound designer and one coder who were intrigued by VR. I already participated in 2011 and 2012, resulting in VREscape and InSnaketion. VR Escape was too complex for most “normal” (non-VR) people to handle: they were not acustomed to VR, and the lack of haptics feedback was disturbing: your virtual hand could go through the walls or tables, so you had to be precise (thus slow) with your movements. “Like a candle in the wind” f Exploration alone turned out to be a great experience.
Figo's Blog Light probes Hello everyone. I wanted to show you something I’ve been working on last couple of FAFFs. The purpose of this post is to interest some of the technical types among you. If you don’t care about a technical discussion about an unfinished feature, you can just read about the basics or jump right to the video showing some WIP pretty pixels. The Basics The problem we are trying to solve is how to use baked lighting on dynamic objects and characters. One solution is to use light probes to sample the nice baked lighting at various points in the scene. Let’s see how it looks like in action! [vimeo clip_id="20385528" width="640" height="360"] The light probes can be used to store the full incoming lighting or just the indirect lighting (plus full lighting from emissive materials and ‘baked only’ lights), i.e. the Dual Lightmaps style. I haven’t decided yet how will placing of the probes in the scene work, as it ties in with what interpolation technique I’ll use. The Details Uniform grid.