This post was originally posted on Room with a View – HoloLens, Unity3D and Blender.
Since the last month or so I have been enlighten myself with an awesome Blender course…and while I had some previous experience by reading some books…nothing could get me to the point that I’m at now as this course…so…enough said…it’s more than highly recommended 🙂
So…one of the challenges was to create something just using primitives…that means…cubes, spheres, cones and so on…nothing fancy…no modifiers…no extra knowledge…so I was able to come up with this…
That was a nice start…but I knew it needed something else…beside getting textures for it of course 🙂 It looked pretty plain…so next step was making it nicer…and this came along the way…
Now…it looks fancy, doesn’t it? Everything hand made created in Blender -;)
So…next step was to figure out what to do with this…it looks too nice to just leave it there on my hard drive…so I start thinking and then remembered that the Holographic Academy has a really nice demo called Origami…in this demo you need to select an origami ball that will drop down a paper plane and then hit a fan that will explode and in turn open a crack on the floor where a nice underground world can be seen…truly amazing if you ask me…so…I had an idea 🙂 Why not have a d-shop frame that will explode when selected and then open a hole in the wall where the room that I designed in Blender could be seen…that sound like an impressive demo to me…so that’s exactly what I did 😉
Here’s the video for your viewing pleasure…hope you like it 🙂
At first I though it was going to be a lot of work…but it wasn't really like that…here are some highlights…
* I enclosed the room in a black box with a hole so it be looked through…
* In Unity3D I simply used an Unlit shader…as black is processed as invisible on HoloLens, having the model in a black unlit box gives the same impression as being invisible…hence…it looks like a hole in the wall…
* I used some spatial mapping to be able to pin the frame and the room to the wall…so it didn’t float around but instead looked like the room was inside the wall…
* When I first imported the model from Blender into Unity3D…none of my textures were available…which seemed odd to me…as they were there and were actually assigned…it turned out that I need to choose every single piece of the model and do a smart unwrapping…so the shader knows exactly how to implement the texture…
* I first I tested out with the emulator…which is good…but doesn’t really implement the same measure units that the real device uses…so while it looked fine on the emulator…it looked too far away on the HoloLens…so a lot of testing was needed in order to get it into the right position…
* To shoot the video, at first I tried using Camtasia…but of course…the rendering wasn’t was I was expecting…one thing is to look it from the HoloLens and other thing is looking from the laptop…so instead I used a recording from the Live Streaming of the HoloLens itself…and that was the trick…
As you can imagine…this now brings a whole world of new possibilities and demos…
Now it’s your turn to show us…what can you do 😉
Greetings,
Blag.
Development Culture.
