After a lot of thinking my current learning goals are:
Make a complete and finished product which uses hand tracking to make the experience feel natural and manipulate objects. Also learn how to make a extensive character creator and use the hand tracking for that.
- Learn hand tracking and have it recognize different gestures. Use it to manipulate objects in the environment. Make it feel natural.
- I have already done a lot with this in the first few weeks. Because hand tracking is an integral part of our game we implemented it immediately at the start of development. It was really fun and I love seeing how you can use your own hands in VR. I also helped Scott to figure out how he can change some code to make teleportation work with hand tracking. We also made gesture recognition that we used for my blendshape prototype. You can read about hand tracking here and about gestures here.
- Make a character creator like The Sims but more extensive, dress up but also molding the model in the game. Merging clothing with the avatar. Have the animation still look good with different accessories.
- This is a bit vague, but I want to learn what makes a VR/game world alive. I mean this in the way of things like particle systems (e.g. for leaves twirling in the wind), lighting (e.g. make it look like a real sun is shining its rays) and environment sound (for immersion and hearing the world live around you, for example: hearing the wind and the leaves rustling).
- 3D-modelling, working with textures. Making animations. Making textures that make a low poly character look high detail.
- This is an old description. My focus has shifted a bit. I do still want to make animations and textures, but the modelling is of a lower priority except that I want to experiment with it in VR with the Medium app from Adobe.