Book Image

Unity Virtual Reality Projects - Second Edition

By : Jonathan Linowes
Book Image

Unity Virtual Reality Projects - Second Edition

By: Jonathan Linowes

Overview of this book

Unity has become the leading platform for building virtual reality games, applications, and experiences for this new generation of consumer VR devices. Unity Virtual Reality Projects walks you through a series of hands-on tutorials and in-depth discussions on using the Unity game engine to develop VR applications. With its practical and project-based approach, this book will get you up to speed with the specifics of VR development in Unity. You will learn how to use Unity to develop VR applications that can be experienced with devices such as Oculus, Daydream, and Vive. Among the many topics and projects, you will explore gaze-based versus hand-controller input, world space UI canvases, locomotion and teleportation, software design patterns, 360-degree media, timeline animation, and multiplayer networking. You will learn about the Unity 3D game engine via the interactive Unity Editor, and you will also learn about C# programming. By the end of the book, you will be fully equipped to develop rich, interactive VR experiences using Unity.
Table of Contents (15 chapters)

Optimizing your scene with static objects

In addition to your art objects, the next step in optimization might be how your scene itself is organized. If we tell Unity that specific objects will not move in the scene, it can precompute a lot of the rendering in advance rather than at runtime. We do this by defining these game objects as static, and then baking them into specific contexts.

We used static objects in Chapter 4, Gazed-Based Control, when we set up a Navmesh for Ethan to run through. His walkable nav area was defined by the flat ground plane minus any large static objects that might get in his way, baked into a navmesh.

Statics can also be used to help precompute the scene rendering. Baked lightmaps and shadowmaps precompute lighting and shadows. Baked occlusions divide the scene into static volumes that can be readily culled when out of view, saving processing by...