Use the 3ds Max Family of Products to Create Real-Time Experiences and VR

JOSE ELIZARDO: Everybody, and thanks for-- whoa! Crazy loud mic. Thanks for making it out to our class. I Think people are still-- we should probably lower that a little bit, huh?

AUDIENCE: OK.

JOSE ELIZARDO: I'm like trying to talk away from it. People are still trickling in. So welcome, everybody.

My name is Jose Elizardo. This is my good friend and colleague Bruno Landry. And we're going to talk to you guys about virtual reality.

So we're going to jump right in. We have a pretty jam packed agenda. I'm going to introduce Bruno. Bruno's going to introduce me, and we're going to jump right in. Sounds good?

Fun. All right, so Bruno-- Bruno's with Autodesk. He's a product designer on the lab design team.

He focuses more on VR these days. He's been with the company about 2 and 1/2 years, 2 years. Prior to that, he was in the visualization field, and prior to that, he has a background in industrial design.

And I thought it would be kind of cool to go over a little bit of Bruno fun facts. There's a bit of music that you can't really hear. You want to pull up the volume a little bit?

So a little bit of fun facts on Bruno before we get started. Bruno is an avid cyclist. He does illegal cycling activities that he talked to me about earlier today.

I'm not exactly sure what, but he likes to do lots of cycling, 48 hours cycling with small periods of rests, and that kind of stuff. He's also a big fan of Bruno Mars. And a fun fact about Bruno is that his last name, Landry, is one of the most popular names in Quebec where we're from back in Canada. And funny thing about Landry is if you add a U, you get laundry. Bruno [INAUDIBLE].

BRUNO LANDRY: --mic? It's-- you kind of set the table, right? Of course. You guys are in for a ride.

Wow. So let me tell you about Jose. So we can learn from his Facebook profile that he started at Autodesk about 10 years ago, right? 10 years, two weeks ago as a QA in the 3DS Max team.

He moved on as a technical specialist for 3DS Max. And fun fact about Jose-- on a Saturday afternoon, you like to light baking, which I think is pretty interesting. So this is our agenda for today.

It's going to be quick and simple. We're going to show you how to go from Max to VR in three minutes. After that, I'm going to end the clicker and the mic because we're going to have to do mic juggling. It's fun.

Jose will tell you how we can build and create VR experiences. And I'll take the mic and the clicker back, and I will show you how we can create-- and in fact, how can we use VR as a design tool for productivity with 3DS Max? So we'll start right off with this. So back in June, we released 3DS Max interactive.

So just so you know and to avoid any confusion, basically, we took Stingray, the game engine, and we rolled out in 3DS Max, in the 3DS Max family of products, OK? So we might see at some point kind of-- even for us, it's sometimes difficult. So basically, Stingray and Max Interactive, as of today, it's the same thing.

But you'll see by the end of this presentation that at some point, Stingray will be more like intended and directed for games user, as 3DS Max Interactive is going to be for anything VR, real time specific, for 3DS Max users. So you'll see that we are building and creating new workflow specifics for real time in ArchViz in real time in VR for 3DS Max user. Everybody is OK with that?

All right, so it's behind us. So as you can see, VR started a while back at Autodesk. And so I'm going to start with this video because it's funny.

So this is about 25 years ago. And I don't know if any of you have heard about Project Cyberspace. So this is 25 years ago. And it's funny because this is kind of me with my team but 25 years ago. So I don't know if any of you have tried, like, bad VR experience.

Like for this one, I guess that after a few minutes, you may need a brown paper bag. It's-- I don't know. It looked like-- yeah, pretty bad.

But where are we now? So I guess we kind of-- like, all that technology problem is kind of behind us now. I mean, look at this guy-- not only is using Samsung Gear VR, LDAR, [INAUDIBLE] surround, but he's having not one, but two milkshakes. So I think-- I mean, most of the technology problem is now behind us.

So let's jump into it. I'm going to show you how to go from 3D to VR in three minutes. So get ready because it's easy. I mean, everybody can do VR, and I'm going to show you.

All right, so just a little background story for this. So this is-- in fact, it's my kitchen. So it's my own and for real. So when we purchased the house, we needed to do some remodeling so we can tear some wall down-- so redo the kitchen, the whole thing.

And I mean, I was a Max artist. And I mean, I had to do it in Max, right? So it's kind of a given.

So in that case, the stakeholder for this was me and my wife. So we just wanted to see, like, the layout of the kitchen, the materials. Did we make the right choices? And when we kind of started to do that class with VR, it's kind of a funny story, because we were purchasing new doors for the house.

So and I say-- so which should [INAUDIBLE] in fact, we were wondering, should we go with super modern black frame inside and out? And we were like, eh, not sure. And it was like, VR would be the perfect use case to test that.

So that's what we did. So in this scene, I mean, lots of [INAUDIBLE] motion model, V-Ray material all over the place. And I made that scene two years ago. Nothing was really like meant for real time in VR. So how fast can we go from this to the real time engine without any manual work? And that screen is--

JOSE ELIZARDO: [INAUDIBLE].

BRUNO LANDRY: --not cool. OK, I'm going over here. So on the right, this is a 3DS Max interactive scene.

It's an empty level. I'm using a VR template. And I'm using a level sync to send everything in my Max scene straight in the real time engine. And in about, I guess, three minutes, I will be able to navigate that scene in VR.

So as you can see, straight out of the import-export process, this is what I have. So the goal is not to have something super fancy. It's just how fast can I go in VR.

So the only thing I actually needed to do is to select those, my floor. And I need to add physics. So I will be able to teleport on those surface.

So that's the only thing I need to do-- add static physics. It's done. I will hit play-- boom.

And I should be in VR in three minutes. And-- et voila. So the goal of this, it's not to have like a beautiful, interactive experience. It's like, can I use this as a design review for me, for my stakeholder?

In that case, it was me and my wife. And you can just teleport in your scene. Again, you leverage everything you already have done in 3DS Max. We keep the VR-- the V-Ray materials. Everything is kind of automatically translated

I did not do any optimization or whatsoever. It's straight from Max to VR in three minutes. So I can just leverage what I've already done in Max and just navigate in my design and see does it make sense for me. And funny story-- turns out that those contractors were supposed to install our door yesterday, and they did not show up.

So I was expecting to have new doors and window on my way back. But that will have to wait a few weeks. That's awesome. But I still can go in VR and watch those amazing doors. It's awesome.

So if that level of quality is not good enough, I mean, for that scene, I took the same-- I mean, at the same step I was, I just light [INAUDIBLE] my scene. It took about 30 minutes. And this is the level of quality I can reach if I just add like another half hour of love to that project.

And I mean, it's not me doing something. It's basically just the computer calculating the light map. And so after that, I'm going to hand the mic and the clicker to Jose, and he will show you how to kind of reach that level of quality and also how to create some interaction and create a real accompanying VR experience. And as you can see, we like Shania Twain at home.

JOSE ELIZARDO: So what Bruno mentioned in that particular video is that those camera animations you saw at the end--

BRUNO LANDRY: Oh, it's true.

JOSE ELIZARDO: --that's just a screen capture in Camtasia and just moving your view. That's all that is.

There's no cameras, no animation. It's super simple, and that looked fricking killer.

BRUNO LANDRY: It's quick and dirty.

JOSE ELIZARDO: Quick and dirty and looked fricking awesome. So why is nothing on screen?

BRUNO LANDRY: Hit Play next.

JOSE ELIZARDO: Oh. All right, so my goal in the next 45 to 50 minutes or so is basically to take up with Bruno left off and to create a more kind of complete VR experience, make it look good, go over all those features and workflows, and create interactivity behaviors, events, triggers, that kind of stuff. So I want to take a moment to thank a company out in Montreal that lent us some of the datasets you're going to see called Alpha Vision.

They're a visualization house. They've been around since '93. They do a lot with AutoCAD files. And the file they give me an AutoCAD file that was brought into Max, rendered in V-Ray.

So, big shout out to them-- you probably know them, David. Yeah, like to put you on the spot. So this is the dataset.

Wow, this is dark. I don't know if we can do anything about that. But that's super, super dark. Anyhow--

BRUNO LANDRY: No, it's beautiful.

JOSE ELIZARDO: It's beautiful. So this is the Max-- by the way, I want to ask you guys. Who uses Max in this room? Whoa, resounding.

Who uses Max Interactive, Stingray, whatever you want to call it? A few people. And by the way, I'm going to say Max Interactive.

I'm going to say Stingray. I'm referring to the same thing. My mind still hasn't caught up, but just know that when I make that mistake, it's the same thing.

So this is the scene they gave us. This is a scene that's like I said, was meant to be rendered in V-Ray, which it was. And they actually built this for a home builders kind of event down in Florida where they attended a couple of months ago.

They gave us that, and we built this with it. So this is a full interactive VR experience built with Max Interactive. There's a lot of stuff in here. There's a lot of interactions. There's a lot of triggers.

There's a lot of different kinds of things. Not everything is going to be applicable to everybody in this room, but the idea is for you guys to think outside the box, abstract from what you're seeing, and use these workflows for the types of things you want to create in your experiences. All right, so you see we have these kind of pop up icons that appear when I approach a certain location. The sound is like really low. There's no way we can put that up?

BRUNO LANDRY: [INAUDIBLE]

JOSE ELIZARDO: Can you guys boost up the sound somehow? No? Because I don't hear anything and I should hear some sounds.

So I have these pop ups that appear that tell me that I can interact with stuff. I can laser point on them. I can create unicorn wallpaper.

I have a little wall plate on the-- music plate on the wall. I can turn that on and add some music. And adding music, It's a big deal. It really helps.

it's spatial sound. It's all based on Wwise, which I'll show you guys a little bit later. But it's all 3D sound.

So it reacts to where you are in the room and changes the sound from left to right. We can create these kinds of animations with furniture swapping. We can even have a Fred Flintstone tape-- super out of scale, but whatever. It's OK. We can also pretend that we're in the "Stranger Things" movie. Who's a "Stranger Things" fan?

AUDIENCE: Woo!

JOSE ELIZARDO: All right, come on. All right, so yeah. So like I said, I won't let the whole thing play back.

Material swapping-- we're going to go over material swapping, animations, sound, audio, and how to set up teleporting and how to grab objects. It's basically what I'm going to show you guys.

But before we get to that, we're going to build it up. There's no audio. I don't know why. It's-- anyways, Shania Twain is playing for those who don't recognize that.

Anyways, let's keep going here. So what I did is I separated out my section into three main kind of buckets. The first is content.

So we got to get content. And I have to show you guys how to bring content in, how to deal with content, how to optimize it, and how to bring it into the game engine. And then we're going to make it look good.

Camera ready-- make it look pretty. And then we're going to build out some interactivity. There's three buckets of workflows that I'm going to show you guys.

Cool. So the first thing is how to get your data in, how to massage it, how to work it, and how to get it into your project-- how to get it into the game engine. All right, so the first thing we're going to do is start off with a temple.

That kind of game engine, Max Interactive is built on templates. This is the project manager. So you have your projects that you're working on or you have templates.

I'm going to grab a HTC Vive template because I'm not putting to the HTC Vive. That's the device I work with. By the way, everything I'm showing you is applicable to the Oculus. It's pretty much agnostic device-wise.

It's just really the output that you're doing. Give it a name, give it a pop on disk, compile. And this is now the foundation that I can start bringing things into to create my own experience.

This level that you see here-- a level is kind of like a scene file, so to speak-- is the VR learning level. It's got a few pedestals with some touch points and interactions. You can basically learn how these things were built and reverse engineer them onto your own assets if you want that.

I'm going to start off with a new level and bring data in. So this is my Max scene. And the first thing I want to mention is that however you set up your hierarchies in Max, whether you're doing grouping or whether you're doing parent and child relationships, all of that hierarchy that you've done in Max will get maintained when you send your content into Max Interactive. All that will remain following the workflow that Bruno showed a little bit earlier.

So here I have this table, and I have these objects that are parented to it. And I'll show you guys how to set that up. So I have these assets on my other viewport.

I'm going to use the select and placed tool to basically drag and drop those assets onto my table and create a parent and child relationship. So when I grab the lower book, everything comes with it. If I grab the table, everything on the table comes with it.

And this basically is considered one object when I send it over into Max Interactive, all right? So it's a way to sort of organize and optimize your scene, so to speak. We'll come back to some optimization stuff a little bit later.

So the next thing I'm going to do is once I've kind of massaged my groups and my hierarchies in my relationships is I'm going to-- actually, another workflow that I want to show you is how to leverage the Asset Library as a tool to replace objects in your scene. So I have these stand-ins around my island.

And I'm going to open up the Asset Library. The Asset Library, if you're not familiar with it, it's free on the Apps Exchange Store. It's basically a way of centralizing your content, your assets, your libraries.

Basically, you drag a folder over onto this left hand side. The contents of that folder appear in the middle. And when you select an asset, all of its information, metadata, and thumbnails appear on the right hand side.

So from here, you can grab assets and bring them into Max in lots of pretty cool ways. The one that I particularly like is replace right here. Set yourself to that mode.

Whatever is selected in Max will get replaced with whatever I drag and drop from the Asset Library. I got my stand-in stools, drag and dropped them, and replaced them. So is a really cool workflow to leverage if, for example, you're working on a scene and a designer hasn't decided on the final look for that stool, for example.

But you still want to do your layout, create your standards, and then, when the designer is ready, drag and drop it in. Cool? So now, we're going to send it in to Max Interactive, play. I'm going to go to level, send all.

This is what Bruno showed you a little bit earlier. This is basically the sync dialog. This is where you select what you want to sync your Max project with your Max Interactive level, with your materials, textures, cameras, lights.

And also, I'm want to make sure that my generate UVs is enabled. This is going to create my secondary UVs for my light beacon. I'm lazy. I don't like to unwrap.

So I leverage the unwrapper and hit Send and go. Now this is, of course, hyper-accelerated. This took about an hour or two to come through. But that's an investment.

It's a good investment to make because the opposite or the-- doing this manually yourself, exporting all your assets and rebuilding your level, can take hours, if not days, of work, and even unwrapping. So I leverage all of this sort of automatic process to recreate my level inside of the Max Interactive engine.

I can connect the cameras, Max's to Max Interactive's. So the views are connected. As I navigate in one, I see the same thing in the other. And notice that all of my assets came through as individual units and all of my groups and hierarchies, of course, were also maintained.

Right, so it's not one big blob of geometry. And also, this scene was meant to be rendered in Viewer. These are all Viewer materials. Everything came through the Viewer-- the shading, the textures, everything.

Cool? All right, so the next thing I'm going to show you right here is- I'm not entirely sure. Let's get there.

It's coming. It's coming. Oh, instancing-- so another thing that the level syncing workflow or feature that we developed supports is instancing. So if I create these kind of randomized instances of the chairs, select them all.

And this time, I'm going to go to level send just selected, not the entire level, not the entire scene, and hit send. That was not accelerated. That's instant because that chair already exists inside of the Max Interactive engine. All I'm sending over is positional and rotational information.

And then Max Interactive is instancing it in its level based on the asset that it has already. You see that if I select any of these chairs located in the project browser, it's all pointing to the same chair. Cool?

So instancing and hierarchies come through is basically the message there. The next workflow here-- how to leverage our online Asset Library. So you've got your content. It's in Max, from Max, and it's inside of Max Interactive.

But you want to embellish it. You want to add stuff. So what we have is an online Asset Library.

So from within any project, it's located right here in the left hand side, your asset-- online assets, different categories in there. You got environments, assets, units, materials, scripts, lots of different things. And we're building this thing out.

Select any asset, hit the download link, and it basically gets copied and downloaded into your own project folder structure. So now at this point here, I'm going to start just drag and dropping objects right in. They snap to surfaces.

The drag and drop from the project browser snaps to surfaces. And very quickly, I'm going to do [NON-ENGLISH SPEECH]. What's that in English?

BRUNO LANDRY: Landscape.

JOSE ELIZARDO: Landscape! Sorry, my French is kicking in there. So we're going to do a little bit of landscaping. Of course, this is a little bit accelerated as well. But the point is that within just a few minutes, we can create these kinds of nice sort of vegetation type exterior environments really, really quickly.

All of these vegetation assets, they're my favorite from the online store. They all have vertex animation on them. So all the leaves are animated automatically.

You can adjust the wind speed if you want after on the asset itself. So as you see here, I have this little shrub here. I'm just adjusting the wind speed, and it wiggles a little bit faster. It wiggles a little bit slower.

BRUNO LANDRY: They are all real-time friendly.

JOSE ELIZARDO: They're all real-time friendly. That's the other point I want to make. All these assets are ready for the game engine, right? They're not just like weird assets that live on Turbo Squid or-- I love Turbo Squid, but they're not real-time ready, right?

These are all Stingray ready, Max Interactive ready. So we also have vehicles. We have a whole library of vehicles.

And again, I like to show this because it's a car-- you know, lots of cars online. But these are not-- they're not black boxes. If you want to make a Barbie car, you can make a Barbie car.

And of course, everyone needs a trashcan, and everyone needs trash bags. And you can send these over into Max if you wanted to to modify them and make them a little bit more unique, not so stock. You can do all sorts of things. What I'm also going to do is show you guys a scatter tool to create grass. So what you can do is from any location in your project browser down here, right click and create a scatter brush-- create a scattered brush.

In this scattered brush, I'm going to drag and drop the assets I want to scatter with-- so two different graphs models. Access to Scatter Brush from the left hand tool palette. Select the brush you just created and start painting. And it's super simple to do.

Anybody can do this. It snaps right to a surface, and you can create really nice looking grass really, really fast. And I'm leveraging content from the Asset Library.

It doesn't have to be that. It can be your own grass models. The point is that you can do this really quickly.

What's really cool too about these models and every vegetation model is that they're hooked up to what is called the global shader, the global wind shader. This guy controls the wind speed for all of your assets if you drag and drop it into your level. Rather than tweaking the wind speed on a per-asset basis, you tweak it on this guy, and everything that is listening to it in the level will update. So it's one way to just have one constant wind speed and have of your objects behave in the same way.

Drag and drop it in-- now all of a sudden, I have a little bit of wind. And I can increase the turbulence on this guy and increase the speed, increase lots of different parameters on him that you can adjust. This screen is really black. It's not good.

AUDIENCE: As a landscape architect, that's a [INAUDIBLE].

JOSE ELIZARDO: I'm really happy to hear that As a non-landscape architect.

AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE]

JOSE ELIZARDO: I'm happy to hear that. All right, so let's keep going here. So cool grass-- it looks good.

It's animated. It's super easy to use, and it's a global effect. So it affects everything. The next kind of workflow I want to show you, I think-- let me get there. Come on.

AUDIENCE: Just enjoy the grass.

JOSE ELIZARDO: Enjoy the grass. Enjoy the grass-- bathwater-- so who wants to make water shaders, all right? Let's go online and grab one.

It's on the Asset Library. Drag and drop it into your scene apply to the surface.

Of course, it's like a really windy bathroom, but whatever because you guys get the point. What I'm also going to show you before I keep going with this-- pause this real quick-- is so you know, you bring an asset into Max Interactive. You build them out.

They've got animations. They've got textures. They've got material definitions. They've got a bunch of logic built into them.

You don't want to rebuild this from level or project to project. We have the ability in Max Interactive to export what we call smart assets. So you can right click on any object in here, export. It's going to export as zip file that you can then important to any other project. And all of its dependencies come along for the ride.

So I'm going to import a rubber ducky because what's a bathtub w without a rubber ducky so let me go find that guy. We have a rubber ducky. It's got an animation clip, a control or a skeleton, materials, everything. Drag and drop it in, snaps to the surface.

And it's all ready to be used. What I can also do is take this guy once I copy it a few times and scale it out. What we can do also is our interop story between Max and Max Interactive is not one way. It's bi-directional.

So I could take content from Max interactive, push it into Max, modify it, and push those modifications back into Max Interactive. So what we're going to do here is right click on any assets you send to 3DS Max. It opens up the asset. I can make some modifications too.

The animation came through everything. And this is tame. I was going to go much Wilder. But he stopped. He's like, guy, stop, stop.

So he basically hit Update. I don't know if you saw that. It went a little fast.

Hit Update. It sends it back into Max interactive. You accept the import.

And then it basically overrides everything in the project. Now don't forget, this guy is playing back in real time. And I just wiped everything from below him, and he just kept going. So it's super robust workflow. It's a super robust system.

Let's keep going here with some people. Everyone wants people in their projects. I don't necessarily think that having 3D people on a VR experience is all that great. It's really weird.

I've done it. It's really creepy unless it looks super realistic. But if you do want people, this is how you do. Or at least with Populate, this is how you do it.

So I'm going to grab a Populate seeded character. I run the simulation. I have an animation over 300 frames.

I can modify that if I want to. If I don't like her animation, I can re-simulate and cycle through different animations. And I can make her high res by regenerating the high res mesh and the high res textures.

Once I'm done and I want to send this into Max Interactive, I basically hit Bake Selected on the main toolbar. Creates a bone rig.

Select entire thing. Go to Export, Export Selected. Make sure that-- give it a name, of course. Click.

Give it a name. Make sure that bake animation is enabled and the appropriate frame range is defined. And hit go. So now I can bring this guy in or this girl in.

I have an animation clip. And she's ready to be used. Now there's a lot of different ways of triggering these animations.

I don't want to create an event. I just want her to loop that animation on continuously always in engine. So what I'm going to do is right click. And I'll show you guys events and triggers a little bit later.

This is just looping animation always. So I'm going to right click on the skeleton, actually place her first-- drag and drop her in, rotate her, put her on the bench

And I'm going to right click on the skeleton and create an animation controller. In here, I can double click on the controller, delete the empty node that's there, and create a brand new clip state and assign that animation clip that came through to the clip state and basically hit Save. Boom-- and we can even bring in multiple people at the same time, one single object.

This can be a crowd of people. Drag and drop them in. Cool? People standing next to a pink car.

BRUNO LANDRY: Yeah, but this could be like any--

JOSE ELIZARDO: Oh, by the way, yeah.

BRUNO LANDRY: [INAUDIBLE]

JOSE ELIZARDO: It doesn't have to be Populate. I use Populate because it's in Max, but this workflow is applicable to any mesh with any bone rig you bring from any location, right? It's the same workflow for everything. In fact, it's the workflow for any animation for that matter.

So let's look at how to make things look pretty and beautiful because what's VR, what's an experience, without something that looks good? So I got my project in. The other workflow that I didn't show a little bit earlier with the level syncing is we also support lights.

So this thing's got a whole bunch of artificial lights that I just unhid. I'm basically going to select all of my lights and all of-- you know, it's got a bunch of parameters set up to create the specific fall off effect that I want. Select all my lights, go to Level Send, Selected.

Make sure Lights is enabled. Hit send, and it just sends it right through. And all of the settings that were on that light-- play-- have been propagated in.

In fact, Bruno's going to show you later some stuff even more cool with regards to lights. I'm not going to steal your thunder. But speaking of lights, that's the story right now. Lights come through.

Regular Max lights, spotlights, and directional lights and omni come through, and all of their parameters come through nicely. And we also have a sunlight that's inside of the template. That's part of any template.

The sunlight exists. It's basically behave like a direct light, so to speak. So I'm going to modify my direct light, orient it a little bit to create a more dramatic effect with the light coming through the windows there.

But you'll notice that I don't have any light sort of shining on my ground here. Like, here, I'm just changing the light color itself. The reason for that is because my glass panels themselves on the windows are casting shadows right now.

So no light is actually coming through. So to modify that or to fix that, I'm going to select my light object. And I'm going to open it up in the Unit Editor.

The Unit Editor is basically a glorified Properties editor. There's lots of things in here. We're going to come back to this quite a bit today.

But basically, in here, I'm going to select my lights and make sure that Cast Shadows is disabled, basically save that. And now I have light coming through and shining on my ground, all right? And I'm just going to really specifically or more precisely rotate it and position it exactly where I want it to be.

And then the next step here is to deal with the environment. I don't like the cloud image that is provided with the template. So I'm going to replace it. I have a panoramic image that I brought in from Photoshop that I'm basically going to just drag and drop and replace my sky dome image with. It's literally just a drag and drop. And the next thing to do is to deal with light baking.

So the effect that I want to create is that I want all of my artificial lighting to be baked-- direct and indirect lighting, OK? So I'm going to go ahead and select all of my artificial lights and I'm going to make sure that the Bake setting is set to direct and indirect. It basically turns them off in the viewport.

But once I initiate my light bake, I'll be baking that lighting information down onto my assets. My sunlight I'm going to handle a little bit differently. Because I have moving objects and because I'm going to animate the day and night, I want the direct lighting to stay dynamic and the indirect lighting of it to be baked. So I'm going to set that up. And I'm also-- not sure what happened here-- going to the light baker panel and start setting up my properties.

So the first setting here is your light map resolution-- so how big your light maps are, how much quality will they have. The bigger they are, the longer they'll take to compute, the nicer they're going to look, but the more memory they require. So there's this big kind of cost trade-off that you got to calculate in your minds.

But basically, that's what that does. The light picker is a progressive refinement solution. It's GPU accelerated.

So it basically progresses over time based on the amount of passes that you give it. So the more passes, the better quality you'll have of a light bake. And then your irradiance intensity is basically how much influence from the sky dome or how much the sky dome is lighting your scene. Think of that as sort of image-based lighting.

So hit Light Bake, and boom, it starts to refine. Now this scene is really big. It's really complex, and it's not super optimized.

So it did take a couple of hours to bake. But once you're baked, you have a pretty nice looking result. You can visualize some diagnostic type views in your viewport.

You can turn on your textual display. This is basically light map resolution itself. So you can see how dense they are. Or if there's any stretching and skewing, you'd have errors in your secondary UVs.

And then you can also turn on your diffuse lighting, which is basically just the lighting solution itself stripped away from textures and reflections. You can see what it looks like there. And another workflow that I'm going to show you is how to optimize assets for light baking and for dynamic light calculation.

So this is a super dense sofa, super high res, that was not optimized at all. And what I'm going to do is basically create a clone of it and hide the original guy. We're going to call this guy low res. So we have high res, we have low res.

Hide the high res guy. On this, I'm going to add a pro optimizer. This is going to reduce polygon count while trying to keep the volume of the object or the integrity of the object.

And notice the polygon count. So we went from about 400 and something thousand to about 100 and something thousand, and we see no difference or practically no difference in the model itself. Right, so this reduced model and the high risk model are both going to be used in a pretty cool way.

So I'm going to now select both my assets, and I'm going to level sync them both into my project. And now they appear, and there's no light baking on them. So what I want to do is grab my high res assets.

And I'm going to tell it to not contribute to the light baking I don't want it to be used to calculate direct lighting onto my floor. But I want it to receive light baking. I want it to receive lighting information and have light baking on itself. I'm going to grab my low res asset and tell it, I don't want to receive any light baking. I don't need to light bake onto itself. But I want it to be used to calculate the shadows.

So the next thing we need to do is tell my low res model not to be visible-- open it up in the Unit Editor, turn off visibility. And now it's hidden. It's no longer being calculated on Runtime. And when I bake my lighting down on my two assets and my floor, I have a correct setup for the most efficient way of baking your lighting.

And also, my dynamic lighting coming through from my window is going to be using the low res to cast shadows, which is going to just run faster. Basically, that's how that works. And then the next step with this is to bake your lighting down. I don't want to bake my entire level. That would take too long.

So I select the assets that are being affected by what I've just done, the four and the two sofas, and hit bake selected and rerun the solution. Takes a few seconds rather than a few hours. Cool?

So the next thing we're going to do is deal with reflections. I'm going to add a couple of reflection probes in my scene. This is going to help capture surrounding objects and big those down as reflection maps onto my assets, that I have reflectivity on them. And we're going to combine this with real time reflections a little bit later to really help sell it and bring it to life.

So bake your light reflections down. Now things start to look a lot better, start to look a lot more realistic. And then the next step here is to do some light balancing.

So if you grab your midday shading environment entity, this is where you're going to affect sort of all your global light settings and all your post screen effects. So here, I added this some exposure. But notice that I go outside.

It's really blown out. So what I could do add an auto exposure. And that would automatically adjust exposure based on where I'm located in the project. I go outside, it tones down. I go inside, it tones up.

We can also add some screen space AO. This is really nice. We have a viewport pass to really see what you're doing as you're modifying the settings. And then, of course, this gets comped on top of the beauty pass.

So you can turn it on, turn it off, turn it on, turn it off. Screen space reflections really-- for me, they're kind of the cherry on the sundae. They really bring it all to life, really add those contact reflections. So you merge that or so you combine that with baked reflections to really bring the whole thing to life.

And then other post screen effects like bloom and vignetting and lens quality-- now the thing to mention about all these post screen effects is they will affect your performance. There's no doubt about that. You can-- I don't show it here, but there's a way to track your performance using the performance HUD, artist.

And it basically overlays. An overlayed graphic that tells you everything that's being calculated and what is the heaviest and what is taking the most time to calculate. Post screen effect take a long time to calculate. They're just heavy. So just, as you're adding them, gauge the performance depending on your hardware and that kind of stuff.

BRUNO LANDRY: And also, some of them look quite--

JOSE ELIZARDO: Yeah--

BRUNO LANDRY: --VR.

JOSE ELIZARDO: Yeah. There's other things too that you just don't want to use in VR. Like, you want motion blur. I showed you bloom, and you probably don't want bloom. You don't want lens quality because that'll probably make you sick. But if you do want to use them and you want to create a sick-inducing experience, now you know how.

AUDIENCE: How does it work on outside stuff?

JOSE ELIZARDO: Which one?

AUDIENCE: The [INAUDIBLE]

JOSE ELIZARDO: That was all inside, yeah. I've done it on-- we had a model of a sort of store, a restaurant that had a parking spot outside. Sorry?

AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE]

JOSE ELIZARDO: I had trees reflecting on-- you know, cars reflecting trees and stuff. It looked good. Looked good. Yeah, I just got to set them up properly.

AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE]

JOSE ELIZARDO: Yeah, because what I don't show in there because it gets a little technical is there's bounding boxes to the reflection probes and fall offs and stuff that you can access. You can really precisely place them and have them blend into each other properly and have the right size and right limits and stuff. I don't show all that, but yeah, it's all there. You can very, very precisely-- yep.

AUDIENCE: Can you optimize it as SAO [INAUDIBLE]?

JOSE ELIZARDO: Yeah, yeah, there were some settings in there. Screen Space AO, there's a half res setting. And then Screen Space Reflections, there's passes, samples and passes. By default, it's set to, I think, four passes in one sample--

BRUNO LANDRY: Yeah.

JOSE ELIZARDO: --which is kind of low. Performs really well, but it's kind of a bit grainy. Depending on your hardware, you can go up.

I've gone up to 16, 16, and I haven't seen any-- you know, smaller scenes there, but yeah. Yeah, we have settings in there to optimize and adjust them, yep. Cool. Interactivity-- this is kind of my last kind of bucket, right?

BRUNO LANDRY: [INAUDIBLE]

JOSE ELIZARDO: No, there's more? All right, keep going? So the first thing we're going to talk about-- we're going to build this up-- is physics.

So we're going to start simple, and then we're going to work our way up to more complex stuff. So the first thing you want to do in a VR experience is teleport. And by the way, our templates, our VR templates, come with a teleporter-- let me just pause that for a second-- come with a teleporter, you know, as part of the VR experience or part of the VR template.

It comes with laser pointing functionality that I'll show you guys a little bit later. All that stuff is pre-baked, quote unquote, into the template. So you don't have to write your own teleporter or script your own kind of basic commands like that.

By the way, the other thing I want to mention is everything I'm doing is non-scripting. I'm not a scriptor. I'm not a programmer.

So it's all out of the box tools. It's all based on Flow, which is our node-based editor. I'll show you later.

It's all artist-friendly tools. I am not a scriptor or a programmer. I use everything that's not programmery.

So if I want to teleport on surfaces, as Bruno showed you earlier, I have to create a physics actor. So I just created a static actor on my pavement. I'm adding a player start. This is so that when I start the VR experience, I'm in this location looking in this direction.