Oculus Rift

If you haven't heard of Oculus rift (and managed to avoid videos of screaming YouTuber demo's) it's basically the latest attempt at virtual reality that's been hailed as the future of gaming / entertainment.
The hype started in 2012 on kickstarter pulling in well over 2 million in funding and releasing to date two "developers editions" or prototype headsets.I was pretty interested in getting one but held off until late last year when the last version Dev kit 2 was released and planned on using it with both my Jurassic park map in Cryengine (was never able) and experimenting in Unity with it.

First Impressions

Most of the articles you read / videos you watch of people trying it for the first time will be them saying mind blowing,amazing etc but in truth my first impression was ..its like sitting to close to a old TV screen .The barrier between seeing something believable and staring at pixels was never really broken for me,black images are sharper and more enveloping but white or lighter environments and fonts never appear that sharp and the image pixels always remain.

After a while I did adjust a little,the head tracking kicks in and you find yourself wanting to grab things on screen,duck or move but none of the demo's I tried really felt like a 'holodeck' type experience.Probably the best examples of the rift experience were the ones where you are seated like "Sightline:The chair" where you have time to adjust to the environment and just look around but when I tried anything movement based that's where the real issues hit me.

Motion sickness

It took about 4 demo's before I knew I was selling my rift.
Playing Team Fortress 2 which has a rift beta instantly made me break out in a sweat,feel dizzy and want to throw up all over my keyboard.After taking a break and adjusting the headset,reading up on possible issues I tried another demo and same effect.A few days passed and tried again but had the same feeling in any game that involved movement using the keyboard/mouse.
Apparently I'm not the only one who gets this effect and I tried adjusting to it over time but it never passed.To be honest I was gutted as I had a ton of ideas I wanted to get working in Unity and had managed to implement the actual Unity - Rift setup fairly quickly for a demo of my own work.

The future of gaming?

Rift might overcome the motion sickness issue but is has a long way to go in general,that issue aside it was interesting/impressive piece of hardware at times but its telling that of all the people I let try demo's of Oculus rift not one asked to try it again and most wanted to take it off after less than 5 minutes.
The hardware itself is bulky and while not heavy its also not exactly comfortable,the screen is too low resolution and on a basic level its not something I could see be used for long periods of gaming or watching movies.
It sounds like I've been very negative about Oculus but my lasting impression is that it's been a little over hyped and feels like a gimmick:a cool piece of tech that's limited by its hardware needs and doesn't serve much of a purpose outside of very occasional short experience's - it's miles ahead of a Kinect -Playsation Move in terms of that experience but would end up sharing the same space...under the desk or behind the monitor.

The rift could change if the right software came along and gave it a bigger purpose but as it is I would recommend a demo rather than a purchase if you're considering.

Review: Crazy Bump

Looking for a normal map maker? then sooner or later you will find CrazyBump,simply because its one of the easiest to use and quickest ways of generating normal,specularity,occlusion and displacement maps.Load the image you want and there's a list of sliders to increase details,intensity etc and that's it done.The layout is clean and simple and you can learn everything in 5 Min's.There are also extra options for batch processing images and you can preview the maps in 3D,worth trying for sure.
Download the demo from HERE

Taking a "Genetica" generated texture and normal mapping with
CrazyBump.

Artlantis Studio Rendering - Review

Artlantis studio is another "realtime renderer",by now Ive learnt realtime means a nice preview..and you still have to hit render at some point!.My first time trying out the program I didn't give it much of a chance,the included sample files are fine but rendering them out was painfully slow.I decided to give it a second chance though and import a .obj of my own scene from Maya.
Once in the program you import a scene or model,there is sunlight setup allowing for location,time of day and cloud cover.A material bank containing some presets such as wood,floors etc and some simple objects you can use.The setup is fairly easy and the preview window will give you a pretty good idea how the scene is going to look.Render settings include radiosity and the main draw of the program is that it creates indoor and outdoor natural lighting well.

5 Min (1280x720) render with hard shadows and high radiosity 

Added soft shadows,7 Min render.Click images to enlarge.

The interface itself while being easy to navigate and understand i found a little off putting,a nicer layout would have drawn me in a lot quicker as when i actually rendered my scene the render time was pretty good.
There is a couple problems in the program,there are only 2 render options (high or low) for anti aliasing and 3 similar settings for radiosity and adding additional lights slow the render time massively.The program also crashed a few times when changing basic settings on a low poly scene.
I'm still undecided on what i think of Atlantis,its certainly worth trying again though.

Unity 3 lighting tests

Spent a hour or two playing around in Unity 3 engine,previously I found the final rendered game graphics to be a bit disappointing so I thought I would experiment with lighting options and see what I could come up with.I imported a couple of my Maya models into the engine to test indoor lighting and anti-aliasing effects.

Some realtime shadows,image effects applied to camera to soften jaggy edges

Forward lighting with some point lights to fake ambience

Genetica 3.51- Texture generator

Spiral graphics Genetica 3.51 is a custom texture generator,capable of building almost infinite amounts of textures for 3d modelling.Begin by selecting a type of texture from dozens of category's such as metals,planets,bricks and buildings and then you move in to 'node' mode.Here you drag and drop elements rearranging a tree of effects,you can click on individual effects and alter them which in turn alters the final texture.Normal maps can also be created at the click of a button and images can be exported for use in any program.

A basic texture and bump map made in 2 Min's from presets.Worth noting the
program does everything from brickwork,windows,landscapes and tons more.

Genetica is a pretty interesting program for texturing and the massive amount of custom and copyright free textures it can create was what drew me to it but its one and maybe only failing is that the results are often slightly random,I couldn't help but think why not just create exactly the texture i wanted in photoshop.For more info on the program check it out here- DEMO

AutoDesk Showcase rendering

I must have  tried at least a dozen "real-time" render programs by now but forgot to actually look and see if Autodesk had one of there own,I stumbled over Showcase while looking at game engines and another rendering program called Marmoset on You Tube.Showcase is a hard program to judge,it has tons of features and presets,its got hdri lighting and a library of materials to play with but compared to some of the other software I tried it isn't particularly fun to use.It might be strange to describe it as not being fun but I think the best programs encourage you to play around,in the case of realtime renderers slapping textures onto objects they clearly don't belong to and looking at the results.Compared to Lumion the renders do come out more realistic and with a less like a game engine.The program is good though,there is huge amount of options and you can create turnarounds and movie's and even add animation but what stops me going back to it is that performance wise its below some of the other software I tried.On my laptop it ran very slow when I tried upping the details,if you have a good computer give it a go for sure but there's quicker realtime software.

I imported my train model and was pretty happy with realtime results
but beyond this level of detail my PC came to a standstill.

Rotating camera on this scene it looked fair,one thing I did notice is
that Showcase doesn't support .obj importing 

Free stuff - Planet texture maker

I'm working on a sci-fi project at the moment and was looking around for free textures when I found this program,Planet Editor randomly generates images that can be used as textures on worlds or for rock and stone,open them in photoshop and change the colors,generate a bump map and you have a totally free texture file in minutes.The program is easy to use and free,get it HERE



Quick example of texture I created (without bump map).



Review: Lumion Realtime Rendering

Real time rendering programs..they have a habit of hiding a button called play,record or movie that's actual purpose is...to render.Lumion is no different but the program itself manages to get away with it because for the most part it does produce some really good real time images.The first thing that hits you opening the program is the design,Lumion looks like the 'sims',everything is ultra easy to navigate and you can explore the entire program in about 5mins.The program itself has a ton of props,materials,animated characters as well as terrain and water.It all has the bright and cheery Sims look.

A Pre-set examples scenes in realtime,the quality settings
are graded by 1-4 stars with this being the highest.

A quick .obj import of my model in realtime the weather
can be instantly updated with lightbeams and fog.

The main purpose of the program seems to be architectural rendering,fly-throughs of streets and concepts which it does do well.On my laptop the program ran with some drop in frame rates and other issues but on a good system I'm sure it wouldn't be much of an issue.Its a good program but limited,the renders have a definite "look" that feels game-ish and it feels more like a fun program than a professional one.When i do upgrade my computer I will probably come back to Lumion and see how far it can be pushed,its definitely one of the best I've tried so far. http://lumion3d.com/
For review's of more realtime render software click program or review tags below.

Review: Daylight Visualizer

Another day another program,VELUX Daylight Visualizer is basically a program for render interiors with natural lighting,it also builds custom rooms and features presets of objects and materials as well as settings to calculate light based on country,day of the year and time.In a matter of minutes you can learn almost every setting and setup and rendering a fairly high quality image or animation,the rendering takes no time.

A basic scene i created in just 2 mins and lowest quality render setting which took about 2 mins

The program claims to support importing .obj files and others but i wasn't able to get it working sadly,its pretty much the only fault i found in the program as it delivers nice renders fast.Its currently on version 2 and free for downloading at less than 50mb (it does watermark renders but only at bottom) and later versions would be well worth checking out.Available here - http://viz.velux.com/
            



Another low setting / ultra quick render using material and object presets.There's some artifacts on render but given the low settings is understandable.

                               

Review: ShiVa Game Editor

Today I tried out Stonetrip's ShiVa editor,a game building engine and authoring tool similar to Unity.Opening up the program the first thing that hit me was the layout which seems to waste as much space as possible,putting all the major an important tools in a panel half way down the screen rather than up top.Once I got past that all the usual features are there (creating lights and shapes etc).Whenever you create object they are added to a library where they can be dragged and dropped into scene,seems pretty simple but with all the menus condensed into one area it quickly gets complicated.

ShiVa 3D Available as a free PLE edition

The demo levels show off some nice lighting and soft shadows and there's a library of free materials and objects to play around with,Maya importing is also fairly simple though the polygon limit seems low.In the short amount of time I played with shiVa I got the feeling Unity's probably got the upper hand with interface and community forums.

Unity 3D 3

I decided to give Unity3d 3 another go,the last time i used it i thought the quality of lighting and rendering was disappointing but after seeing the program version had updated and there are now lots of add-ons,scripts i wanted to check out if anything had changed.The first time I tried Unity my goal was importing Maya models in the hope that the game engine could be used for real time renders,this time i decided to look at it as a game engine and how complex scenes could be as well as how well the lighting would work.
I managed to import a pretty large scale model i built a while back in Maya with minimal fuss (the vertex limit is somewhere around 65,000) and set about lighting it.The main lighting was directional light and a couple of point lights to add some glow,Unity Pro also features image effects which you drag onto the camera,so i set up an anti-aliasing effect and some bloom.The results are pretty decent actually,it took around 20mins to put the scene together and although theres some slow down external lighting works fine.

Bloom image effects applied to camera

In-game render after 20 mins work.

                                     
The next scene I tried was  internal lighting and this is where the limitations of the engine showed again,there are 2 lighting options,deferred and forward.Deferred lighting means you can have soft real time shadows on point lights and forward means you cant,clearly you need shadows so its got to be deferred.Until you see the quality of the shadows.By turning on deferred every edge,shadow and line flickers and pixelates,you can spend hours tweaking settings,adding image effects and blurs but the quality just doesn't cut it.

Deffered lighting causes pixelated shadows in Unity

From a distance the scene looks fine,but edges become choppy

Forward lighting of the same scene is more clear but shadows are gone.

               
Unity is a great program and I'm sure a few version's down the line it will be even better but right now its still limited to certain projects,outdoors scenes and casual games for mobile wont notice the problems but for bigger projects theres better programs.Next up I try Shiva3D...

Unity 3 3D with Maya Review

I decided to give Unity 3 3D game development a try over the last few days,its basically a program for creating multi-platform games fairly easily and quickly and it supports importing Maya objects but i thought it would also be a useful way to real time 3d scenes.The interface and setup is actually pretty easy to learn and the main draw was that i was able to import Maya scenes in just a few minutes,just put your Maya file into the Unity project folder and it converts it and imports it.When it comes to lighting and rendering its all easy to set up but sadly the final result isn't quite what id hoped for,you can achieve better results by baking lighting into static objects but the engine has some clear limitations.Looking around the web you start to find the number of videos showcasing the engine are limited.It was worth trying and future releases might be interesting to check out,time to try the  Unreal Engine...

EDIT-- More in depth look at Unity 3 with renders here- http://sharkswithjetpacks.blogspot.com/2011/08/i-decided-to-give-unity3d-3-another.html