When Honza started octopusengine, he was thinking about the universal platform to use for VR. One of the options was to create it from scratch.
But sometimes it’s better to focus on important things and outsource the rest to existing solutions.
And because games are the frontier of Virtual Reality, there were two game engines which supported HTC Vive integration – famous Unreal engine, and Unity 3D editor.
From these two, Unity seems to be more useful with comprehensive tutorials and great community. Also it is more versatile, as opposed to Unreal, which is focused mostly on games.
Our VR lab, running on Unity
Right now Unity fits our needs pretty well. Although in the future, we will create our own engine which will support all media.
By the way, if you want to try Unity for yourself, here is a little guide how to start for free:
- Install Unity Personal
- Get to know Unity Editor basics (tutorials are helpful).For Czech and Slovak speakers join our FB group for Unity
- Play around. Learn to use Hierarchy, Asset, Inspector. Create your first Scene, Game and 3D Object. Use some Component and create Material. Adjust position and rotation of Main Camera.
- If you are programmer, see our github and learn how to use scripts in Unity.
- Test our objZero – add it into a scene and move it around with arrow keys.
- Ready for VR? If you have HTC Vive or Oculus Rift headset use VRTK library .
- Welcome to the Matrix Neo. Contact us if you want to go deeper down the rabbit hole.
We are sure you will have the basics laid down pretty quickly if you give it a try. Just take a look what our project manager Maťo created after only a couple of hours working in Unity.
Where there is unity there is always victory. – Publilius Syrus