Tutorial Feedback

Tutorial Feedback - Brian

As our project becomes more hands on and all on deck, we have the opportunity each week to meet with a member of the tutor team here within the Animation course. This week our team was meeting individually with Brian, a tutor who has an impressive and successful background in the gaming industry.
With this knowledge Brian has he knows the Unity interface and was able to offer us some advice and suggest helpful elements that we could implement into our scene and narrative to really make our project stand out.

Optimisation was was a key point of conversation as I spoke to Brian about the scene and the amount of geometry we have within the scene at this time. Moving forward, we will need to work as a team to ensure that each part of the scene is a inexpensive on playback time as possible.

Brian recommended using the Unity site to research various tips and advice for optimising our scene as best as possible. He told me to look at the page “optimisation for VR in unity”

The site was very helpful for an insight into various components that will help us moving forward with both importing our environment and our animated characters. The Profiler is a tool which will help us to visualise how much time is spent by the software, rendering each frame of our project. In addition to this, the Frame Debugger is another tool that will be important for us as a team when approaching our scene in Unity. This tool will allow us to freeze the playback on a frame and then step through each individual draw call to see how the scene is constructed and register and record the particular areas that may need further optimisation.

Brian also mentioned 'Texture Atlasing' to me which is a strategy in game design and model texturing that allows the creator to place all textures into one map rather than having all textures separate. This will optimise our scene, our models and will make the time spent rendering and the running of our project less expensive.

We also discussed our team gaining more regular access to the VR Lab based in the university which isn't being used to its full potential. With this space, our team will be able to create our piece in a focused, spacious and efficient way. We are hoping to make this space our working HQ as we approach the lat few months of this project.

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