VR from Scratch

RYAN JOHNSON: All right, awesome. So we can get started now. This is not just a blank screen, this is me. So I'm with D3 technologies. We're a Platinum Autodesk reseller. I do a lot of training in various programs. And actually, this is a better profile photo for this class.

Last year, I sat in a bunch of VR sessions, and I was very excited about it. And I said you know what, next year I'm going to do a class on VR. Now, I hadn't done it before. So that's why I titled my class VR From Scratch. So this is really like from the ground up.

So that's a little bit about me. I want to ask a couple questions about my audience. First off, is anybody in here a VR developer already? OK, a few of you. What do you guys use? Like what program do you develop in? Unity. Unreal. OK.

So we're going to go through some of that, what software is out there and stuff like that in a little bit. Do I have any 3ds Max interactive users?

AUDIENCE: I tried.

RYAN JOHNSON: You tried? OK. Yeah, and that's mainly what we'll be focusing on today. So you'll see a lot of stuff in that software.

Any 3ds Max users? Yeah, awesome. OK, so that's one of the main reasons I picked Max interactive, because I already use Max. All my stuff was already in Max. So I figured it'd be a nice easy transition. Inventor. OK, Vison360. A couple. Revit? I thought that'd be big one. Now this works. OK, SolidWorks? OK, all right.

And I'm asking that-- like, all of those programs can be the starting point for VR. So it doesn't really matter what you're using. But that lets me know who I have in the audience a little bit. So we'll go through the purpose for today's presentation.

To look in on this process of development from scratch. So hopefully at the end of this, either you'll be really excited about 3ds Max and want to start, or you might not be. That's OK too. That's why you come to these sessions, to get a kick start on the information gathering and stuff like that.

I really don't like that bar on the bottom of my screen. OK, it's gone.

Yeah, back here. OK, so here's our agenda for the day. These four main objectives were covered in the class proposal. So how many of you signed up for this a long time ago, and might not remember what it's even about anymore? Did anybody just drop in today? A couple people, OK. Awesome.

Yeah, so these are the objectives. First of all, the proposal. I'm going to talk about the project that I proposed, that got me into where I'm at now. And then our main objectives, here. What are the options? If you're starting from the ground, how do you pick what you're going to use to develop, or what hardware you're going to get? Getting your model into the yard. That's the first main step. So how do you just get that stuff in there? Second, main step, navigating the model. You'll figure out after I get the model in, that I'm going to be showing you guys it's kind of boring. You're just standing there looking around. I mean, it is really cool. But it's better to be able to move around and navigate in the model. So that'll be a pretty good topic.

And then this last one, interacting with your stuff. This is really the biggest topic that we have. We're going to spend a lot of time on that, because this is where all the work was. So when I first started, I got barely into the project, and I already had a model in, and I already had navigation. And I was like yes, this project is going to be awesome. I'm going to finish it so early. And then I got to that last step. Oh this is a lot more work.

But it'll be fun. We'll see a lot of examples of the types of things that you can pretty easily build in the 3ds Max. So that's the plan. Does that sound good to everybody?

AUDIENCE: Yeah.

RYAN JOHNSON: Should I add anything? No ideas, all right. Also, I like interactive classes, but I have a lot of stuff. So if you have any questions, I'm going to hold those till the end. Is that OK with everybody? But feel free to clap or laugh or cry or shoot me with darts when I mess up really bad or something. Yeah, keep me on my toes. So if you guys see darts flying through the air, I've planted them in the audience to tell me when I'm doing something bad.

Here's the proposal. So, Cush Suspensions. This is a suspension company that we work with. I've worked with them a lot. In 3ds Max I've done a lot of renderings. And this was basically the proposal.

What you're looking at is a pile of trade show truck suspension. So there's this annual truck show, the MATS truck show. And every year, they haul all this stuff out to Tennessee or somewhere. I'm from Springfield, Missouri. So they haul all this out there and set it up in their booth.

And it's pretty nice. You can walk around, you can touch the things, you can feel them. But it's a lot of work, and it wastes all this space in their messy shop. The rest of the year they're just sitting in there. Oh yeah, I thew some--

So I've done a lot of renderings for them. I already had models, they already had materials. Brochures, trade show, backdrops and all kinds of stuff. So I figured this would be a nice pilot project to get started with. So what if instead of that trade show mess, you had something like this? So I've got some little mini suspensions you can pick up and look at. And this video is a little choppy. Yeah, oops I knocked one off.

What if you had like labels and things that interacted with you. These are following my head position around, so no matter where I'm. At I can see what I'm looking at. What if you could have animations? They're all kind of floating in the air spinning around. It gets choppy on the projector. Or this one, this is really cool. Build an animation where you could actually have an exploded view where they could walk around and see all the pieces of it.

So you guys are actually going to see how we created all of that stuff. That was my proposal. What if you guys could have this set up your trade show booth, and people could have experiences that they would not otherwise be able to have. Or this giant, unreal sized suspension that you could walk around and look at and touch, kind of.

That was my proposal. Cush Suspensions said, yeah, go for it. That would be awesome. We were really excited about this. At the same time, I made a proposal to Autodesk. This is actually kind of scary, you feel like you're going to fall off of the thing when you're walking up there. Anyways. You guys will see more of that in a little bit.

So my secondary proposal was, hey Autodesk, can I teach this class at AU? And they said yes. And all of you guys signed up for it. So I hope you enjoy it. Yeah, so I did have a tight deadline for Cush. The show is actually not until next year. That wasn't my deadline. My deadline was you guys in here.

So I did have-- we'll talk about the getting started process here in a minute some more. But that was my proposal, and that's how I got here today.

All right, let's get into our real objectives. This first bubble is VR hardware and software options. So we have hardware options and software options, and then going to talk a little bit about planning for VR, and for what can go wrong. I really don't like this stage, so let me walk around down here with you guys.

First let's talk about hardware options. And I kind of divide these into two groups, immersive and interactive experiences. By the way, whatever I have on here is probably already out of date, because this is changing so fast and there's new stuff all the time. You guys probably, if you're in this room, you already follow VR, and you probably already know most of this.

So I'm going to go through it, I'm just going to breeze through it. But if you're at a spot where this is completely new to you, maybe this review will be helpful. Kind of what's out there. So immersive reality, this would be like a Google Cardboard, Daydream, the Samsung Gear, or the Oculus Go I put on there too. That's a newer one.

Most of these, they're immersive. You put on the headset, you're looking around you're experiencing-- but what they don't do is track actual movement. So that's mainly like the rotation. Now you can teleport usually with these things, to get around in the world. But they have less-- they're more limited in tracking, usually.

So they are really good for that immersive experience, but they're not as interactive as other ones. Of course this is a comprehensive list. This is just some examples.

Interactive reality, and you probably see all the acronyms, VR, MR, AR. HTC Vive, this is the one that I'm using. So you get the headset, the controllers, some base stations for tracking. And then you have the Oculus Rift. MR is Windows calls mixed reality. Really, it's VR right now. But the difference is that they don't have a separate base station, all of the tracking is contained in the headset units.

I don't know. They're cheaper. They don't track as well. Actually, I have a Lenovo one also. And the other thing I don't like about it is if the controllers go off to the side or behind you. The headset can't see it anymore. You lose tracking of where your controllers are at.

So I think these-- the Oculus and the HTC one are maybe a little more accurate. Then you also have super cool stuff, AR. I have the HoloLens there and a Magic Leap. Has anybody in here tried out some of this stuff down in the exhibit hall? Yeah. There's a lot of cool experiences out there.

I wanted to bring mine here, but if it was like a-- like you guys get to come try it, then we would have spent a whole hour of you just watching other people play in VR. So I did not bring it.

Software options. And again, this is not comprehensive. Unity, Unreal. And some of these I've never even used, but I've heard are out there. Oh, Lumberyard is made by Amazon, actually. It's a game. And then of course, 3ds Max Interactive. This class we're be using 3ds Max interactive.

Now why did I pick that? A couple reasons. First of all, I already have the product design and manufacturing collection. So I already have it. Also, I used 3ds Max already. They have some really cool interactions where you can connect what's in 3ds Max to what's in Max interactive. Where when you make a change in one program, it also syncs to the other program.

So if you're still working on a scene or materials or whatever, you can interactively do it and sync it, so.

What could go wrong? This is on my planning bubble. What could go wrong. First off, this looks like a really bad idea to me. Please don't mount your base station with tape to a boombox from the 80s stacked on top of the hutch on your desk. It worked when I first got my computer and I was real excited to try it out. But that really wasn't what went wrong there. What went wrong is one of my two base stations came to me defective, it had a fault in it. And I sent it out for shipping two and a half months ago, for repairs, I mean. Do you think I've received it back yet? No, I have not. Who knows where it's at. So I bought an extra one. It was a good decision, in retrospect.

So I mean, failures. Here was another failure. This was the awesome computer I was really excited to get. And I opened the box, and the packing slip on my box was some guy in Indiana. He got my computer, and I got his computer. Which wasn't really nearly as nice. And so we called up the company and said, hey, you need to halt that shipment. Don't let him have it, because he won't give it back to me. And then they send it back to their shop to rectify it. So it was two more weeks before I actually got my computer either.

Already I'm behind schedule for you guys. Sorry, I can't do anything about this. So here's what else could go wrong. I don't know what happened in this room. A tornado went through it or something. It used to be a nice looking office. But this is where that base station was taped up to the boombox. There's chairs flipped over, I don't know.

But here's what went wrong besides my office becoming really messy. I only left it there for like a week, and then I had to set up in this room. And then I had to take my setup, because Autodesk needed that room, and I had to set up this place where I was for a couple of weeks. And then from there, I had to move it here, which really is my favorite spot, because I live there.

And so in the weeks leading up to AU, I spent way too much time not actually being in the place that I live. But I definitely think if you're really working on this and you need to set up the equipment somewhere, find a dedicated space where you can leave it. Because moving around all this time-- I mean, I'm really good at set up now. But it was a lot of work.

Here's what else can go wrong. Not sure what happened there. Either Kevin is laying on the ground looking up at a suspension, or he tripped on the cord and fell, or something-- I don't know. This also can go wrong. When dogs fall asleep in your play area, they do not show up inside your simulation. You can step on them. They won't be your friends afterwards.

So anyways. It's kind of some fun stuff. But really out of that, it's going to take time to get your equipment. It might take time if something goes wrong. You want a spot set up where you can do all this. So that was all part of my experience in getting started for this project.

All right, we're onto the second balloon. I didn't bring my stopwatch with me. OK, we're good.

OK, the second one is actually getting your data into VR. So before we even do that, we're going to talk about some prep that you need to do in Max Interactive. The 3ds Max Interactive user interface. So if you're brand new to it, this will help you to see how to get around in it. And then importing from 3ds Max, or importing directly into 3ds Max Interactive from like an FBX file or something. So those are the two main methods you'll use to get data into Max interactive.

First of all, preparing for 3ds Max Interactive. This is what you see when you first launch the software. You're not even really in the software. You're in the project manager, and you've got to pick a project. So I started building this presentation with a bunch of text. And I hate sitting in a presentation where they're just reading that. So instead, you guys are going to watch m me actually doing it. And also, I recorded these so I could go through a lot more content with you.

So these are all templates. Depending on what your destination. In this case, I'm going to pick desktop VR. This is for the Vive or the Rift. It's basically a template that's going to have everything packaged up and ready to go. So what you build actually works for that program.

And then when you launch the-- this is the test level that you'll start at with that desktop VR. It's just nice little museum. It's kind of cool, you can hit play right away and jump into the level and do some stuff. We have a baseball and some bats you can throw around. There's some really nice materials and lighting and stuff like that.

But I don't want to drop my suspension into this hardwood floor museum place, right? I want to build a new level. So we're just going to go to file, new level. This creates a new blank level that you can load. They call it a level because it's a game that you're building. You can load your suspension in. And I'm also going to save that right away. Or it can get really messy if you're not pretty particular about where you put stuff. So I am going to where the levels should live, and this is where I'm saving my level. It doesn't take you there automatically. It takes you to some other root folder. So I put this in here.

And once you're done with that, you can really delete all that museum learning level stuff out of your project. There's no reason for it to be in there if you're not really going to use it. So we got a new level. One last thing that I'm going to do is when I open this project, I want it to start in this new level that I'm building. So we're just can go to settings, project settings.

And there's a lot of stuff you can change here, including what you'll see me doing right here. This is the default startup level. And so when you click on the button to change that, it will be a list basically of every level that's in your project, and some core levels. There you go, it's ready to go.

So that was all prep. We haven't even got anything in yet. But once you're to this point, you can drop your stuff into kind of--

The UI. So again, there's a lot of different pieces of the UI. And you notice next to a lot of these numbers, I have more than one label. So there's actually several tabs that can show up in all of these places. And these are all things that I used in getting started. Again though, I'm going to actually show you them.

So the view port, obviously, that's where your stuff goes. I recommend holding down the-- control, or the alt? I have to feel my keyboard. Anyway, with your three mouse buttons. Rather than trying to roll your mouse wheel to zoom, or like shift middle click or something [INAUDIBLE]. It'll be way harder to do. It's way easier to hit the key and then click your three mouse buttons. OK.

And then this is the flow editor. Or the level flow, actually. The level flow is that last bubble that we're going to spend a lot of time in. It's really cool. It's really powerful, it's pretty fun. But there's a lot of stuff in here. So another thing about this, if-- did anybody get the handout already from this class? I watched a lot of tutorials and things where people went so fast, or they would grab something but not tell you how they got to there when they clicked like three times. So I made it a point to document exactly what I was putting in the flow editor on the handout. So everything that we're going to go through is actually listed in there, if you guys want that.

This is the asset browser. So once you add models, materials, whatever. Anything that this game is going to use, it goes into that asset browser folder. And then log console. Not really that important, unless you get an error or something. Surely that won't happen to you guys when you're building something from scratch. But log console, it's a good way to figure out what's going on.

And then we actually added one that didn't show up before here, story editor. We're going to be using this today. Story editor's for building simple animations inside of Max Interactive, which is one thing we'll do.

This is the asset preview. So basically, whatever you click on, you get a nice preview. It's useful if you want to get a detailed view of something before you drag it into your scene. Make sure this is the right suspension that I'm adding into this showroom, or something like that. And then over here we have the explorer is a little different from the asset browser. It only shows stuff from the level that you're working in. And then create. We will show in just a minute the adding-- you probably won't be creating like actual models of stuff in here. You're usually pulling that in from somewhere else. But we have a player start, trigger. Those are both useful.

And then this is almost the last one, property editor. Anything you select that has properties that can be changed. That's where we change it. So I'm modifying a material here with those properties. A mesh-- a unit object, which is like your things, don't really have properties. Here's the player start though, which I added a up there on the create panel. And it does have some properties you can modify.

I think that's everything. This really-- maybe I should stand up here, because my neck is getting sore. Oh, yeah. The unit editor. I forgot about that one. So unit editors can be really important, we'll actually get into that pretty quick. That'll be the first thing we do when we need to add interaction with our model.

So it's basically kind of like a detailed editing for this one thing, and it's all units. So this would be like your model files. You open them in the unit editor, and then you can modify them. OK. And then that's it on the UI. Did anybody already know all that? Those parts. You're like, come on. Some of you guys that are already using Max Interactive. OK. Excuse me. There's a mic there.

Importing from 3ds Max. So this is the first real thing we're going to do. Finally got our little set up. And we're ready to import from 3ds Max. We'll talk about materials a little bit.

So this is just-- I think this came from Advanced Steel or something, it's juts a file that I got from co-worker. And I wanted to throw in more than just my trade show example we'll be doing later. Because some you guys don't work in that industry. So this is, I always thought a really cool application for VR. Like something you can actually walk around in, like a facility.

So here, I'm just looking at the materials. I do recommend standard materials in Max to transfer. I had some physical materials and [INAUDIBLE] materials, and Mental Ray materials and that stuff came across. Vray also does come across.

So basically I have the model. And what I showed you there is that Max Interactive is open. The level I want to send this to is open. And I'm going to hit level, send all. There's some options in there. The light banking will look good but it takes a long time to generate UVs.

So I like the send and close, because then the dialog box goes away. It tells you it's done sending it. And here we are in Max Interactive. It took way longer than that, but I sped it up for you guys. Another reason I didn't want to do live demos in this.

So it's got to load everything, and then it's got to compile everything, and then it'll be ready for you to look at. But I really didn't do anything yet, this is pretty awesome. I have it in Max Interactive. And just to take a look at what I added in that models folder. Here you see the scene name. And this is exactly how the objects existed in 3ds Max before I hit the send button. So this is what I got in Max Interactive.

One thing I'm going to add here is the player start. I like to control where I'm at when I start. So all you have to do-- this is built into this template-- is just add it. I tried doing some stuff for the Google Daydream and it didn't have the player start, and it was really irritating to me. This template does have it in there.

So I dragged it and dropped it in there. When I hit play to look at this level, this is exactly where it is going to start. So here we go, we'll try this thing out. I have a model in VR. I did almost nothing. Now you can walk around a little bit, but only within the area that you can use in your headset, or in your play area.

Otherwise, this is mainly pretty cool. But I can't go anywhere. Like, I really want to go out there, and there's just-- I can't do it. Besides that, it's pretty cool. So I took the headset off and put it on the ground, as you can see there. I should have stopped recording earlier.

OK, so standard Vray, those are both fully supported. And there's the same converter. So if you are coming from 3ds Max and you had a model, all of-- most of my Cush models were all Mental Ray because that's all I used until it went away. And so I can use the same converter to convert a lot of that stuff over to something that'll move across.

All right, and then-- so who's not using 3ds Max? Was is a lot of you? Yeah, so if you're not using 3D Max, you may just be importing a file directly into Max Interactive. And so that's what I'm going to do here.

So this will be an FBX file. And I actually created this from 3D Max for animation and stuff. But it doesn't have to be. So first, data organization. Right, I'm going to make a folder to put all this stuff in, instead of like dropping it all in the project root or something. And you can either click import, or you can right click and import asset.

And we'll just find this FBX file. Again, there's a lot of options here. Do you want to include the materials and the texture images? And all that stuff. Or animation, do you want to include. We'll just kind of go with those base options. And click import.

So after a little while, you'll see whatever you imported shows up. We can see it in the preview there, we got a full suspension model ready to drag and drop into my model. And that's literally all you have to do, drag and drop. I had this kind of built through the floor, so just its positioning in the original file. So we'll raise it up in the air a little bit, and rotate it around. Pretty easy.

I don't know, do you guys think you can follow that? Import. It's there. I am rotating the sun here a little bit, because I don't want that shadow going over my suspension. I want some better lighting. Which, I mean, a lot of the stuff that's already in the scene, you can literally just grab it and modify it like that. So here we go. Awesome.

Now you guys don't get to see what this looks like in VR yet, because I want to be able to walk around the thing before we do that. Also, I threw a note on materials in here. There's an online asset browser in Max Interactive, that has some materials and models even that were built for Max Interactive. Which are pretty cool. You can just drop these things right into your scene just to play around with it. Even stuff that's animated, like the grass and the trees flow with the wind, and there's wind parameters where you can change. It's pretty cool. So there is a lot of online asset browser stuff that will-- good props and good materials. Yes?

AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE]

RYAN JOHNSON: Yeah, Yeah. I'm sure you could get it there. I don't know if I've ever imported SolidWorks straight into Max. Can you do that, or would you have to convert to a neutral? That would be the question. If you could get it into Max, then yeah you could do that. Or there may be another format. You could export directly from SolidWorks and just skip Max. Just bring it straight in here.

OK. So hey, we're halfway done. Kind of. Navigating the model. This is actually really a pretty easy step. It seems like it's going to be a lot of work, because this is a big thing. First of all though, we're going to talk about navigation options.

So here's my two options. Moving or teleporting. Moving traditionally. This would be like what you do if you're playing a game. You click a button, the character moves, right? Or you push the trigger and it moves. Now I've spent a lot of time flying around in Google Earth in VR when I first got my setup. And let me tell you, not a good idea. I mean, you should definitely check it out because it's really cool. You can fly through New York City. But this can definitely happen. Thanks Dave, for being my model for that.

If your character is moving in VR but you're not moving in real life, it's like a-- you'll get sick pretty fast. And most of you guys probably experienced that. Actually last year at AU I did a thing where I was driving in a car and there was a bridge. And I wanted to see if I could crash off the side of the bridge, and I did it. And as soon as I took off the headset I was just like, no I couldn't. Yeah, we can't say that this isn't the real reason that David was sick.

Also, by the way, just so you know, you can drink out of a red solo look up with HTC Vive headset on. It takes careful practice, but you can do it.

So I'm not even going to show you guys any way to do that, I hated it. I didn't like moving that way. I want to teleport. And teleporting you guys will actually see right here. It's pretty easy. You just basically beam to where you want to go, and you go. So for this step, we're actually going to go into the unit editor. For the thing that we want to teleport onto.

So we just right click on it, and pick show in unit editor, you can also double click it from the asset browser. And really the main thing we need to do is create what we call a physics actor. So you guys will hear this a lot for the rest of the presentation. Anytime you want to interact any way with anything in Max, it's got to have a physics actor assigned to that.

So I'm just going right click on the object, create a physics actor, and that floor now has a physics actor. We have some options here. I'm going to leave it static, because it doesn't move. But I do want to change the mesh type. If you can use a box or a capsule or one of those templates, definitely use it. The simpler the model, the less calculation is going to have to go on when you try to teleport. So that simplified box model worked really good for the floor.

I do also want to be able to walk up the stairs and walk around on these gratings. So we're actually going to add those things also as physics actors. So just right click, and you open in unit editor. And you can actually open more than one thing in the unit editor at a time. So here I've created the physics actor. By the way, I'm going to leave it on mesh here. Because if I turn it into a box the way this unit is created, it would be one big box, and I wouldn't be able to go inside of it.

So here I've just added-- I opened the stairs also in the same unit editor. So you can flip around back and forth. We'll do that a lot. It speeds things up if you can do the same thing to three models at once, instead of closing the editor and coming way back into it. These are all-- and the same thing with the stairs. It needs to be a mesh.

Let's try it out. So here's my start. It's nice and sunny. Let's grab these things. So I don't know if you can see, but I'm kind of thumbing on the track pad right there. This is what you use to teleport. You hold it down-- on the HTC Vive-- and when you let go, you land wherever that green target is. So I can teleport over the suspension now and walk around and see how bad my materials look. And how much finer I need to make the mesh. I can come over here and look at the ladder from a different perspective. I can't climb it and-- whoa that's really weird when you walk through something that you can do it in VR.

Now the stairs are a little bit of a problem. You can see they're really challenging to walk up, or pseudo walk up. Because you have to land exactly right. So probably in real life, I would create a plane as a ramp or something like that, and just make it invisible, but to where I could still land on it.

This is crazy right here. Whoa, I like grab at the wall right there because I thought I was going to fall off of the thing. It is crazy. You guys are watching a video. It looks like OK, but when you're immersed in this thing, you really feel like a sense of vertigo when you're standing on the edge of something tall. It's the coolest thing ever.

So even if you're not going to do a model like this, you should definitely import one in the 3ds Max just to try standing at the top of something really tall and like jumping off the edge or something. That was fun.

We got our model in. We can teleport wherever we want in there now. And we're only 35 minutes in. So guess what we're going to talk about the rest of the time? Interacting. So this is actually-- this is a pretty big topic. We have picking stuff up, we have adding stories and adding complex animations. We're also going to spend a lot of time in the flow editor. And like I said before, it'll all be documented exactly what I'm clicking on, because we'll go through a lot of tools here. And then affecting things inside of the level, also.

All right. So picking stuff up. There's my Vive controller. Generally when you're touching something, you'll click the trigger and it'll let you actually pick it up and do things with it. And then we'll talk about why would you even want to do that. So this is a new level. As you can see, I just modeled this showroom.

I wanted to put some normal stuff like brochures and a retro TV set. And like, stuff that you might have in a traditional trade show booth. But if you look this direction, we now have this big showroom of stuff that would be impossible without VR. So that was kind of my idea.

We're going to go take a look at one of these brochures, though. So in order to pick something up, can you guys guess what I need to do? If you want to-- unit editor. If you want to interact with anything, at all, anywhere in Max interactive, needs a physics actor. Yeah, so that's the first step. This is a little bit different than the last one that we did. while the physics actors is selected, we want to make it dynamic. Now it can move around, it can be affected by gravity, we can pick it up.

So that's really the main step there, just create a physics actor. I want to use the box mesh on this. And there's also some other settings. I'm going to make this a sweeper, since it's a thin piece of paper. Don't worry. If you leave it default, it will probably work good. But that'll keep it maybe from falling through things if the physics didn't calculate fast enough or something.

And you can see there's a bunch brochures, or there are a bunch of brochures on this stand. But they're all instances of each other. They were cloned in 3ds Max. So you only have to do this to one of the units. And then the rest are all instances of that unit. I am going to open the stand, because since the brochure can fall now, if there's nothing for it to hit, it will fall right through that stand and through the table and land on the ground.

So I've got to open the stand, and then I've got to open the table. And we're going to leave those static, because I really don't want them-- the table falling to the ground as soon as-- it's floating. It doesn't have legs or anything. Do you think I want to use a box here? Nope. Yeah, my brochures need to be able to sit down in those racks.

And by the way, I didn't have that at first. But the brochures were just in a stack, and it was really hard to pick one up, because I was going through like 10 of them and picking one in the middle up. These things, I want to be able to pick up and play with, too.

So we're going to do the same thing. And again, I told you earlier, like if you can open a lot of things at once and then do the same thing to all of them at once in the unit editor, it's a lot faster. This did take a long time, because those models are pretty heavy. By the way, one other thing is-- I'm going to change it to box.

Yeah, these came from Inventor originally. I shrink wrapped them so it's one object that I'm putting into the scene. Which is a lot easier than having an assembly of a lot of parts. So now this isn't going to be super accurate, because it's calculating physics on this box shape. But it's good enough for what I want to do. The mesh would be really heavy. It might take a lot more processing to solve.

So here's my showroom. Oh, that's a nice TV. Let's take a look. Right, so we got a brochure. We can pick it up, we can even read it. This is really cool. Actually, it's kind of boring. Like who would read a brochure in VR, right? Get this thing out of here, I don't know, this is really fun.

So this was really cool me, too. I didn't expect it to be so cool. But you can pick the thing up. It's tiny, but you can hold it right to your head and see all these details. It's pretty cool and also I want-- oops. I want to know what would happen if I hit that. Action. Let's get this out of there.

So really, if you do this, I could play with this now for hours. I became a little kid again, apparently. It was pretty fun, though. So all you have to do, creative a physics actor. Make it static-- dynamic, I mean, so it can move around. Yeah, that was-- this was pretty cool.

So there was our first interaction. Picking stuff up. Now you might be like, well you just pick stuff up it threw it, why would you do it? It makes it way more fun to be able to interact with the model. These were some ideas I had. I wanted to model a giant basketball hoop out in space, so you could chuck the suspensions and see how many-- you could even have-- like if they went through the hoop, you could have a score card automatically update with the flow editor, or something like that. Or suspension Jenga.

I don't know. You could create stuff like that that's going to make any-- this is for a trade show, I want people to put this thing on and to get information. But I want him to have fun so they remember the thing later on. It's pretty cool that you can do that kind of stuff.

All right, adding stories. This is going to be simple animations. So there's not a lot going on in this flowchart. This is the kind of stuff that you should do in Max Interactive.

All right, and we'll do it right now. So let's get away from this traditional trade show table thing. Let's go over here where the real full size, life size suspensions are. I thought it would be cool if instead of just sitting there floating on these platforms, they were like really slowly rotating all the time.

So I have the suspension selected in the story editor. I just clicked new story. And as you can see, properties for the transform of the suspension show up. Definitely recommend you rename your story immediately. So if you've got five or six stories, it's going to be really hard to work with if they're not all named.

And here, I'm just going to rotate the suspension just so I'm looking at the rotation property to see which one moved, which was the y. So that's what I want to animate. First off, whatever you have selected, If you click add key right there, it's just going to add every key that you have selected. So I'm going to slide over to six seconds in, and I'm going to select y, that's really the only one that I needed to add. So I'm going to type the value and click add, and added a y value. I have rotation now.

If I do play, you'll notice that it eases in and out of the animation. This is the natural thing that happens. But I don't want that to happen. If it's going to keep rotating for, it would slow down and stop and then start again, and then slow down and stop. So I'm just going to select everything. All of the keys and use a linear tangent. Now it's going to be a linear motion, so it'll never do that slow down at the end of the rotation.

So that's a pretty simple story. That's the kind of stuff that you can add directly in Max Interactive. You guys don't get to see yet, because we're going to do that next. This is a more complex animation. This is the kind of thing that you probably don't want to try to do in Max Interactive. In this case, I actually animated the FBX file in 3ds Max. And I'm just going to pull that FBX file with the animation and everything into my scene.

So, sorry if you guys didn't get done with my flowchart yet. But we're moving on for time. OK, so we're going to go over to this giant stage that I built, and this is where my animation is going to happen. So we already imported the FBX file, you guys know how that works. I'm going to create a folder. I'm going to right click import asset. And the only difference here is that I'm going to check the option for importing the animation.