 I will not, I'll do a resize, like this, it's too loud. Alright, what's that sound? It's too loud. It's too loud. Microphone is here. I think he will need it. Well, I guess it's working. Hello, my name is Rob Tauro, I'm the creator of the Golden Age VR, going back to 6050. It's a great project. Last year I was here as well. I talked about the history of the project, why I'm creating it, what my vision is, why I love that Golden Age of the Harlem. And I was pretty excited, I was talking on a half an hour about how I started with things and the challenges and everything like that. And now I'm back, because I said last year, I created my whole project in Blender Cycles. It was a pre-rendered scene, what meant to be a 3D movie. And during the process when almost everything was done, I got in touch with the Oculus Rift. And my mind was blowing away. I thought, I create this 3D movie and now Oculus Rift is coming. And that's so awesome, what to do about it. So I had a discussion with the people I work with and I said, I think this is the thing to do, to change. And I said, that's okay. So that was my talk last year. And now I'm here back. So what I will do is I'm like a short introduction about a project showing the latest teaser. I guess it's now working with Sound and everything included. Project challenges, because we have a lot of that. What kind of engine and how VR space is working. Future VR development with my company. And if there is some time left, there's time for questions. I don't know if there is time left. So, yeah. I get inspired by these beautiful paintings. It hits me and it's giving me always thinking about how to get that experience. To get back in time and walk around at lovely, seeing these lovely buildings and people there. Beautiful time. Yes, as always. I got in touch with a Dutch museum. It's placed in Horn in the Netherlands. And my previous project was in 2011. I created 22 3D environments from the Golden Age. And they showed it in a nice room. And people loved it, but same with me. We thought we want to go into that world. And we start with that. So me and the director of the museum have the same vision. What we want is going back in time. And we thought about it in this project how we will do that. And what we're now doing is we're developing 34 chairs as you can see on the right. It's a VR arcade machine, including the Oculus Rift with HP workstations. The best of the best. Good GPUs from NVIDIA 980 to make that experience. It's going to be epic. It's a project for the next couple of years. And, yeah, we're almost done. The only thing what needs to be done right now is getting everything in place. We started a couple of weeks ago crowdfunding in the Netherlands. You don't know that crowdfunding website. But we wanted to have 32,000 euros extra to buy all these chairs. And we're almost there. We have two weeks left and we always get the money. That means the people in the Netherlands want to see this project. They want to go in that VR space and see the Golden Age. And I want it as well. So things are getting pretty good. The Golden Age VR inspired the paintings was the key to make it happen. Working with Blender and Unity software. Very important to know is that there was no Golden Age VR when there was no Blender or Unity. Blender gives me the possibility to start as an independent artist. I didn't have to buy expensive license. I was very young. I could start with Blender, building my first scenes. And now we have the Golden Age VR. It's incredible together with a very nice community where we can work together, ask questions. It's fantastic. And that's the same for Unity. A lot of people working with Unity because there is a free version and we can help each other. And that's great. So thanks to these two programs, there is the Golden Age VR. I love that. So, next. The Golden Age VR teaser. It's pretty bright on the screen. I don't think we can dim the lights. What can we do? It will be awesome. So it's a real-time teaser that I captured. Can you dim the lights? You can imagine that. I really love that time. And what you see is what you get. You can walk there in that beautiful space. So I'm still fine-tuning some small bits, including more characters and looking for the right balance to launch. So project challenges. That's a good one. I had one year to rebuild the project to make it feel ready. So imagine I have never worked with a game engine, never worked with people who were into that. I had that Cycles project. I had all these buildings and characters that were created in Blender. But were not working with Unity. So what I had to do, I had to rebuild all these buildings. They were very high-poly. So I could throw them in the bin and reconstruct it. So that would take a lot of time. New character design and pre-rendered versus real-time gaming world challenges. What do we have here? Here's an example. I don't know if the verdict count is visible. I think there is. The building? Yeah. The building on the left, you can see it has around 35,000 vertices. And the one on the right has around 4,000. So that transformation, you may think, how the heck does he use 35,000 vertices for it? I was not organized. I used texture sizes from 2,000 by 3,000 pixels and stuff like that. No tileable textures. Because when I had the scene, I put everything together and hit render in cycles. And after a couple of hours, I had renders or movie scenes. But when you work with a game engine, it needs to be powered very, very fast. So when I put these buildings there on the left in Unity, I had around a couple of frames and stuff like that. So it was horrible. And it was also, I had to look for a new style. So that building there on the left was looking very ugly in a game engine. When you get very close, if you're space, you have to use a kind of design that matches with it. So that was a trial and error process. What was pretty challenging, but very fine as well. You're learning a lot. So I forgot more examples. Maybe you can switch. Oh, yeah. So this is a sample of a building with LOD, level of detail. So the one on the left has around 830 seats and the one on the right, 4,000. You can almost not really see. Yeah, you can see the difference. But it works really well when you are walking around. It's changing each level. And yeah, when you have some places where you can see 50, 60 houses, it's a lot of, it asks a lot from your GPU. And when you work with baked textures and this kind of organization, it really worked out well. But yeah, that was also a trial and error process. When you are getting used by using, well, when you're not really organized, then this is really powerful. So whoop. Yeah, this is raw footage from Blender. So from last year when I was here. So it's a few port, a few. The fun is when I made a render it took me around 30 minutes and I had one frame. Of course it looks awesome when the nice cycles renders is lighting everything beautiful. But Unity needs for development care too. It's 150 frames in one second. So I had to do some other magic. Yeah, this is raw footage from Unity. I can put it away. And yeah, because of the use here, a lot of water reflections. I had 100 frames. But when I removed these water reflections, replaced it by some other shaders, what looks pretty good as well. I get 150. And yeah, that's great. That's looking pretty cool. Character development. That was a fun thing as well. Add some character artists who create some characters. And it was not working in Unity when exporting it. They were looking like this all the time. Yeah, we were talked about it. It was created by Bruno to create new characters and to solve something or create a pipeline to create the characters and putting them well in Unity. And that took a while. But in Yent it's working pretty good. I think Bruno created a short video where you can see some movement. I will show that. Things goes well. Churaka walk cycle. Yeah. Documents. Right click. Oh, it's going to be so angry on me. Okay. I'm a new witness. Oops, wrong one. So what do you do? I just control click. We'll give you that. So that's looking pretty awesome. Smooth animations. And it works well in Unity. Or this is captured in Cycles. But we have the low poly version in... Oh, in Blender. All right. You can close. You can get away. I've got more movies, but I'm going to hide them. So another thing that's pretty interesting. Well, I was going to use creating worlds in Cycles. When I worked with VR, I call it VR space, because you're really into that world. It's really different. Because when you create props or buildings, you sometimes use a lot of bump mapping, flat surface. But when you are in that VR space, you want to feel that. You want to feel everything, like you're walking and you look everywhere. And you need detail. And what you actually want is a low resolution world. So you can have a high frame rate. So you have to find the right balance. And that's really challenging. Frame rate. That was also a real challenge. The first scene that I created was in January with DK1. This is a very dark image. But this scene was with props, nature environment, but no characters with a resolution of 1280 by 800. And I get around 90 frames. I actually wanted scenes with 100 buildings and including characters. So it was a kind of stressed out. So I had to invent techniques to make it work smoother. So this is the final scene. And I have a movie clip, if I can open it. Everything included. And with HD resolution. And we are now getting the 150 frames table. And that's really cool. So, Jonathan, can you help me one more time? I was going to get stressed out. Can you open the... This is the last one. So you can... So first movie clip. That's really dark. But as you can see, I had around 30 frames for left and right eye. It was really not enough with DK1. So I think, oh, how can I solve this, man? It was horrible. With DK1, it was... Instead it was not a high frame. Okay, but when DK2 was arriving, you had with low persistence a kind of ugly jitter. So you have to run with 150 frames, 148 with kind of horror. And this is a movie clip that shows you that we have a very stable frame rate. It's showing 60 frames, because I could not record this video on the direct H&D. And that's only possible with 75 frames. But, yeah, just watch it. So this is how it looks like when you walk with your face. Yeah, and that's what I said before. You have to avoid the flat surface. Everything needs depth. And I think when you work with VR, you have to think different. And with different, I mean, it's not that you're generating a game world like the games, how we see them today. But what I like to challenge is creating places where you can enter buildings and you can watch through windows and you play with that thing to having really the idea you are in another world. So it's not walking around like a large environment, so I'm trying to keep my scenes a little bit small when there is a lot of things to do and really almost everything has depth. And that's nice when you're walking if you are. Yeah, and textures needs a high resolution. And that is a little bit battling with when you're baking everything, because that's a low resolution. And when you get close to an object, you really want to see every detail. And that's so much fun. But at the same time, you're getting the challenge in Unity you have, or in every game engine, you have draw calls. And, yeah, when you reach, I think in Unity's around 2,000 draw calls, you get jitter or you get low frame rate. So I'm getting a lot of feedback for you have to put more stuff in your scenes and make it bigger. And then I think, yeah, but I'm battling with these limits. But it's fun playing with that. And one more thing when you're working with VR is that you have to keep things bright. Because bright scenes will fix how you say you get a lot of depth when things are bright. I experimented with wear system where you get nice rain effects. And then I mentioned that the depth feeling was kind of fading away. So I'm now not doing that and keeping the things a little bright. Yeah, that's what I mentioned also. When you're working with this, try to keep things small and put a lot of detail in it and not huge scenes where you can walk everywhere and, yeah, it's a bit boring. You really want to play with that VR effect. My further VR development plans is the possibilities with VR. For me, this is kind of a totally new world to play around. It's like having the first Nintendo computer with these graphics. For me, it's a new age for content creation. We don't know anything about it. And it's just experimenting what is cool. And when you look in the future, I think there are so cool things possible. And that's what I'm doing. I'm playing around and not thinking that we are there yet. And that's a funny thing. Yeah, that's me. We're now launching in December with this project. I'm going to be the first in the world with 34 machines going to be epic. But it doesn't mean we're already there yet. This is just the beginning. It's maybe just a little bit when we want to go there. And that means we have to experiment creating better content, better characters and entertainment in the scene. That's what we are also doing. We launch this project and we keep it very basic. So we won't give people all the possibilities to have a quest system or storyline or other pushing factors. We just want to show them what it is. How to is to walking through your space, sitting there on a bench and looking around. That's what this project is about. Enjoy that fear and not just pushing everything. You can do everything because that's not really working. You can see Oculus is improving that helmet. They want more pixels and they want higher frame rate. And I think that's important but you also have to look at the content. It's so important. I think you can have a fantastic experience with DG2 if you create the right content for it. I think that people have to watch that as well. I'm already working on new projects. Things are going really well. That means I'm always looking for new team members. So if you think I really like that VR stuff or game design, Unity or anything else. Let me know. I'm always interested in new people. We have now a small team with six people. Most of them are character artists but also both creators and rigors. Yeah, let me know and contact me and maybe we can work together. Are there questions or are we out of time? That's a good question. I'm trying to keep everything in blender but I had one year and I don't say things are impossible. Everything is possible but I had to do something and Unity is giving great solutions for VR right in this moment and that's what I'm taking. I wanted to release this right now and when I had to focus on blender I think it was very hard to make this quality what I have right now so it was for me not the best solution but the only solution for me in that moment to create what I wanted to have and of course I want to create these things in blender and blender is I'm still working in cycles, creating projects but right now I don't have the possibilities or the knowledge to get that out of blender. It's just I'm not good enough to do that. So of course if there are people who say wow we want to improve that and make that well I'm the first one who was willing to create VR stuff with blender but that was not the time and not the moment to do that. So a bit of a technical question. You had a point there that argued that we couldn't have flat surfaces on models in a VR environment. Couldn't you bypass this limitation by implementing tools that were used very much in the game scene such as parallax occlusion mapping? Yeah, that's a very good question. That's a fun thing. There is a boat including the scenes we're using a lot of tessellation I mean think you think you mean that. I did not have the right tool I was not skilled enough to work with that so I keep things low profile but still then I try to avoid flat surfaces but yeah with techniques like you mentioned that that's really impossible and that's what I want to introduce in further updates. So yeah, that's a good one. Right, yeah? So you said that you had quite a lot of low FPS when you have those 100 buildings there so what kind of trickery you used to overcome this like you have started using LODs for buildings or streaming? Yes, exactly. Well I had to break my brains to find a solution to put 150 buildings in a scene. So what I did was working with LOD but I also used for the background really low poly buildings maybe for every building around 130 I can feel the background and for the rest of it it's all based on LOD it's switching to another level and you still have an idea it's a very high detail building and that's how you fake the thing that I answered in your question. Exactly. No. Yeah, I choose for that because when I started working I had to create a kind of a pipeline where I was talking to it and LOD I've never worked with that I thought okay this is a very nice thing to integrate there are maybe way more things to improving the scenes but baking in LOD was the thing that I used for creating this and I'm always looking for better implementations to make it faster so... Do you plan the LODs in leather? No, no, it's the LOD system in Unity but I create of course the LOD models in Blender I did no modeling in Unity it's everything in Blender Last question That's quickly, very awesome project you have created this environment and it's beautiful and it would be a shitty it's only a walking simulator so I suggested to look into games a bit and put some content there but not gaming content maybe just a character approaches you and says hey look they are making a new ship and then you walk with the people and people are going there and you see more happiness in the environment I would think about that No, sorry but it's a kind of noisy but I'll come to you Thank you Thank you very much My English is sometimes...