byteframe2-Hoarder_Halloween
This is another domicile filled with static props, considerably larger than my previous one room. I might have bit off a bit more than I could chew. Having all this junk looks cool, but also trashy, and I hope to do different (smaller) kinds of environments for a while. I planned this all out on paper when my power was out, so it's impactful to see it built, and fairly close to the intended result. I started to feel like I was wasting time by placing tons of props and basically playing the Sims, but then I released I can copy and paste clusters of props across maps, so it seemed worthwhile to have a big house full of stuff I can clone. Learned how to change the pivot points for better prop placement.
This one has an outdoor area. Got more practice with the asset sprayer, and learned texture blending on the terrain, and some inner surfaces, the latter looks pretty hot. The terrain itself looks bad, such that I made the sky a dark night dealie again, which later played to the Halloween thing. I punched a house sized hole in the middle of the outdoor mesh before displacement to spare the house, but it screwed up the terrain and it's got a bad stretched look from non square quads. Overall though it functions fine as a spooky outdoor expanse which you can barely see.
Got in practice with the house geometry. It's all still one mesh, except for the stairs, which I made first after some mockups. I think I'm honing in on the proper procedure to layout the design and extrude the second floor such that lengthwise edge loops are the same on both floors, but screwed that up some how and had to (eventually) shoehorn another loop. The mesh is still inner facing without and outside facing extrusion or what not. Still figuring out my best procedure for this 'making hollow'. As for now, I need to stop the bad habit of deleting the inner 'hidden' faces of extrusions I use for trim. I (thought I had) to do alot of sewing around the whole mesh, because of this. It's probably better to have the somewhat 'separate' extrusions be just that for simplicity and lighting purposes. This was all later made larely irrelevant when I learned about cubemaps during the lighting phase and split up the house into sections, which was nice. Beveling still looks good to add detail, even though it confuses everything if I do it too early, so I need to delay it until I really sure about the layout. I'm getting better at undoing stuff with vertice merges blah blah. I have a feeling its probably best to plan edge loops to provide structure for the beveling which will make it look better too. If I can do most of this before texturing, the better.
Making the teleport mesh was a big pain in the ass. I screwed it up at first, and tied the whole house to the vr teleport area, so for several hours I thought I screwed up something with the geometry or lighting and the whole house was invisible except for when I was trying to teleport. Face palm. Overall though, they aren't use useful as I would lke, and props can still get in the way. I'm glad I learned how to add them, but also confused as to when and a mesh suddenly becomes unusable for teleportation. This level should be as navigable as any other such steamvr environment, which is too say, cumbersome. I don't like the teleportation used in SteamVR home, it needs to be more forgiving of random stuff in the environment, or I need to learn more science for this. Atm they are rectangular enough for me to not have set the 'mesh' type...
Lighting... I still don't really know what I'm doing. The window reflections with the cubemaps are harder than I thought. I only noticed them at first because the TP mesh showed up in there, and I had to eventually find out how to exclude them from cubemap generation. A worthwhile learning experience, but it might want to be noted in the tutorial for those. This tipped me off to the cubemaps and all that for the window reflections. I originally had one light probe volume (after learning how to resize them this time, and made it the size of the house. Silly, ofc, because windows on one side of the house had reflections of rugs and stuff only visible from the other half of the house. Still currently figuring out how to place, and size these volumes to the proper faces look at the right cubemap. I dont know why it's so hard, but just now I'm able to see it in real time as I move it around in the editor, and I'll probably come up with something ok. Adding a light_importance volume inside of the house, and excluding the outdoors really speeds up vrad, maybe down to 20 minutes instead of 50. How do I make it use more threads? Ehh, I give up, I seem to for the sake of closing have one volume so the main windows look good, and Ill delete the glass for the other windows so that doesnt look off, and overall it looks good. Edit, didn't give up, I learned I have to split the sections of the house from one mesh so they can obtain differant cubemap reflections!