Tech Art Tomfoolery: Unreal VR and glsl
Updated: May 21, 2021
Happy Tech Art Tuesday!
My Youtube Channel has 200 subs now! That means I'm famous!
I don't have a tutorial today but I did want to showcase some of the stuff I did this weekend.
On Saturday morning I studied a bit of glsl and played around on ShaderToy. I'm at the very beginning of The Art of Code's tutorials so I have nothing interesting to show at the moment. In fact, it will probably take a while until I can show anything shader-related... I take my sweet time with the tutorials because I want to understand these basic concepts as much as possible. I have to brush up on some vector math too.....
I also explored the Unreal VR template. I've always wanted to make a "VR Punching Bag" game and recently a friend of mine suggested turning the bag into Grima Wormtongue from The Lord of the Rings.
The setup was very easy: I just modeled a very quick punching bag in Maya, UV-unwrapped it, then put it in Unreal. I enabled physics in the bag mesh and changed its center of mass to be on the bottom, so the bag would keep bouncing back up. You know, like one of those inflatable clowns people give to children with anger issues (I've been both: the child with anger issues and the clown LOL).
However ladies and gentlemen, I wasn't satisfied. I want to push Saruman the White off Isengard's tower.
I modeled a low poly Isengard and Saruman's staff, enabled physics and changed the location of the VR player pawn to be on top of the tower. Here's what I have so far:
One thing I learned is that whoever created this teleportation BP made it dependent on a cube volume called "navmesh" or something. Basically your teleport mechanic only works inside this navmesh, which is why I placed it on top of the tower along with the pawn (you can see it at the very beginning when I'm flying around the level).
I want to keep working on this, but I need to study the Unreal Blueprints a bit more. My next goal is to have an "extra points!" message appear to the player if Saruman's mesh collides with some spikes at the bottom of the tower.
That's it for today!
- Fernanda