As I wend my way further into this VR experience, the more complicated things become. I was lucky enough that a talented voice actress recorded a few lines of dialogue for me – I’ve been trying different methods of getting more advanced animation, especially facial expressions, into Unity. I tinkered around a bit with the .MHX2 file format – but it seems getting it to work with Blendshapes in Unity is a real Gordian Knot to untie.
But – even as one problem gets stickier – another is getting easier. I’ve decided to add a police officer as an antagonist. Possibly trying to set up a mechanic where if the user looks directly at him, he’ll get aggravated and harass the user. But that is down the road – I’ve been busy working on one of my favorite parts of 3D – Rigging!
I’ve been encountering difficulties with the Rift SDK – my project wouldn’t play in the editor and my builds would crash. Since its new tech, getting help is a bit of an uphill battle since everyone is still figuring it out.
Out of the blue, Valve announces their own SDK plugin for Unity (with UE4 support next week) and I thought I’d give it a shot. Well, its a win / lose – I can play in editor (and in VR!) but my builds only play a black screen (but it plays without crashing!)
Also – I saw on reddit a generous VO actor offering to record some dialog for free, and I pitched my idea and she accepted it! So I’ll have a few disparaging lines from a snooty secretary type to mess around with. Which means I’ll have to explore the .MHX2 option for Makehuman export, as the regular .MHX gives me a single jawbone to try and lip sync with…
