# Exploring Virtual Reality and Animation

Going through the Art Science Laboratory Website, I Found that there are various cycles and projects which are implementing virtual reality, this was an opportunity to explore and get familiar with this new medium and technology.

## Week 1 - Day 1 - First Meeting

I met the team and we got assigned various roles, I will be working on a music video which could possibly use VR. Other than that I will be assisting Chaitanya and eventuall Archit in using virtual reality in their course/cycles.

I will have to learn Unreal Engine as well because it can used to make Experiences for VR and I need to have 3 completed Projects by the end of these two months, and i intend on VR being one of them.

## Week 1 - Day 2

Looked at various references for VR Experiences today. Here are some of the ones that stood out to me.

[EDEN - Drugs (Music Video)](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HCpnhMH1vXs)
[Show it 2 me (Music Video)](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SsFa5JhSDH4)
[Dear Angelica (VR experience/Storytelling)
](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qulS_oMvnJY)
[Travelling while Black (VR experience/Storytelling](https://www.theguardian.com/tv-and-radio/2019/sep/02/traveling-while-black-behind-the-eye-opening-vr-documentary-on-racism-in-america)

## Week 1 - Day 3

Diving deeper into VR experiences, Used an Oculus Quest 2 For the first time and It was quite incredible. The sense of immersion that VR can accomplish is astounding and It did give me ideas of the kind of experiences i could possibly build.

# Learning how to Develop Vr Experiences

Getting familiar with VR media was step one, now i needed to figure out how to make stuff in VR. Photoshop and Blender both support panoramic cameras which can be used to create VR animations and illustrations.

For a test run, I made a quick sketch on photoshop and converted it into a 3D panorama.

[Sketched Sci-Fi Interior](https://rohanmahesh6.artstation.com/projects/xDmgOr)

<iframe width="100%" height="640" frameborder="0" allow="xr-spatial-tracking; gyroscope; accelerometer" allowfullscreen scrolling="no" src="https://kuula.co/share/50m1Q?logo=1&info=1&fs=1&vr=0&sd=1&thumbs=1&alpha=0.60"></iframe>

This came out pretty well, and I wanted to try it out through Blender's panoramic camera as well.. So i did.

[Sci-fi Room in Panoramic View](https://rohanmahesh6.artstation.com/projects/6NRlBW)

<iframe width="100%" height="640" frameborder="0" allow="xr-spatial-tracking; gyroscope; accelerometer" allowfullscreen scrolling="no" src="https://kuula.co/share/50m1Z?logo=1&info=1&fs=1&vr=0&sd=1&thumbs=1&alpha=0.60"></iframe>

Only cycles support panoramic rendering and that takes eons to render, so will need to find a way to refine that and make it efficient, if we're thinking of going into rendering animations. *(A realtime in-engine rendering pipeline could possibly fix this issue.)*

I Felt the room still felt pretty basic so I tried out two more variations.

[Sci-fi Corridors in VR](https://rohanmahesh6.artstation.com/projects/LRE1Lk)

<iframe width="100%" height="640" frameborder="0" allow="xr-spatial-tracking; gyroscope; accelerometer" allowfullscreen scrolling="no" src="https://kuula.co/share/50mbj?logo=1&info=1&fs=1&vr=0&sd=1&thumbs=1&alpha=0.60"></iframe>

<iframe width="100%" height="640" frameborder="0" allow="xr-spatial-tracking; gyroscope; accelerometer" allowfullscreen scrolling="no" src="https://kuula.co/share/50mfc?logo=1&info=1&fs=1&vr=0&sd=1&thumbs=1&alpha=0.60"></iframe>)

## Unreal Engine 5

Since making an entire Music video on just blender would take a ridiculous amount of time, because of it's render times, I realized using a realtime rendering pipeline might be the fastest way to tackle this project.

So I decided to rack my brain and learn as much of unreal engine as i could in these few weeks.

Unreal Engine is mostly incorporated in real-time pipelines as far as i am aware. I decided to try jumping right into it and import the stuff i made in blender into unreal engine 5. I realized, it may not be as simple as that as there are numerous nuances to working in this software which I havent figured out yet.


Unreal engine is very multi-layered software, it gives you multitudes of ways to work in 3d and render a final product. In my studies, besides the basics of the software, I learned how Texturing works and how use master textures, to give you a greater flexibility in editing and changing textures and also learned a few things about lumen, It's lighting engine as well.


After that I decided, I should attempt to create an environment in Unreal Engine myself and I decided to use nanite assets from Quixel Bridge


Although this one looked pretty good, The file became extremely heavy and performance draining. It ran fine but I dont think my laptop is fit to run something like this.