What 390.00 usd buys you for VR development.<\/p>\n
I have been banging away about 10 hours a, with development for Firedrake VR on a I3 Laptop for about seven months now.\u00a0\u00a0 In the beginning, when I first started learning Unity and developing Firedrake, I naively figured if I used a dev system that was \u201cequivalent\u201d to the level of power that mobile VR devices currently had, it would make for a more streamlined dev and iteration process.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 My thoughts ran along the line that I would be seeing close to the same performance on the dev machine as the mobile s7 platform I was targeting, for the Gear VR and could adjust in Unity before building to the GearVR, thus saving myself some testing time.<\/p>\n
For the most part, it kinda\u2026. \u00a0Sorta\u2026 worked. \u00a0The Unity editor was fairly snappy, I had 8 megs of ram so I could run unity, and Monodevelop at the same time,\u00a0 frame rates and processing stats in unity were on par with the s7 (once I did some tweaking of both platforms, of course) \u2026\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 for the most part\u2026<\/p>\n
Where I was way off in my figuring, was the heavy processing\/rendering I would have to do , mostly with the light baking in Unity, to get the right type of lighting needed to run the VR app smoothly on mobile vr.\u00a0\u00a0 \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0You don\u2019t get to have ANY real time lighting in a Mobile VR app.\u00a0 The performance hit is just too great for currently cell phone based VR.\u00a0 So one of the big performance tweaks you do to your app for mobile VR, is to \u201cpre-bake\u201d the lighting effects into your Unity models beforehand.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 This gives you some fairly nice lighting effects, with almost no processing overhead.<\/p>\n
Anyway, the lightbakes require a fair amount of processing power on the dev machine to pre-figure it all out and the old Dell I3\u00a0 would sometimes chug for 72 hours straight to bake the lightmaps comprised of fairly low resolutions in Unity.\u00a0 My 3d Levels are reasonably small and there were only about 12 baked, point lights per level,.\u00a0 The settings in the lighting editor were also pared down, only 20 trexels, quality set to low and resolutions set to medium, no final gather set\u2026<\/p>\n
This time hit really slowed down the iteration rounds\u2026. and really got to be a drag for development in general.\u00a0\u00a0 It would take an hour or two to make some changes in the level, then 24-72 hours to bake the light to that I could test it live and see what it would actually look like on the Gear VR, since you always have to do real-world testing on the platform you are deving for when It comes to mobile VR.\u00a0 \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0My dev schedule went from what I thought would be about six months, to month after month, barely making headway.\u00a0\u00a0 Doing a change, like fixing a environment tile seam, then waiting\u00a0 on the bake\u2026 not getting it right and having to change it slightly again\u2026then waiting on the bake\u2026 over and over again\u2026<\/p>\n
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Then one morning after a long night waiting for a typical render to finish so I could check a fairly simple change I had made.\u00a0 I decided I really didn\u2019t want to deal with it any longer and I hatched a plan.\u00a0\u00a0 I wanted to see what kind of VR development system I could setup on a shoestring budget.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 I set my budget at 500.00, since that\u2019s about what was left in the dev budget(actually a little less \ud83d\ude09 and started looking around for some new hardware.\u00a0 I already have a S6 and S7 with a couple different versions of the Gear VR headsets, so I didn\u2019t need to worry about the actual headsets, but need an upgrade on the computers that I used to author the VR apps on.<\/p>\n
I stared lurking on the local Craiglist\u00a0 \/computers for sale postings.\u00a0 I wanted to get a feel for what type of hardware and who was selling for a few days.\u00a0 CL \/foresale can really be the Wild West and it\u2019s always a good idea to watch the postings for a while.\u00a0 You can get a sense of who and what is selling and what deals look \u201csafe\u201d\u00a0 I.e.;\u00a0 good equipment in the right price range that doesn\u2019t look shady. \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0After a few days I kept seeing a post from a guy who worked at bank and the bank had just retooled and upgraded their corporate computers and he had a bunch of corporate pulls.<\/p>\n
He had a couple of dell i5 minitowers he wanted $90.00 for.\u00a0 They were first gen i5 2400 cpus with general low end specs, but they would be a huge upgrade from my i3 mobile CPU and I offered him 60.00 a piece and since his ads had been reposted for a few days, I figured no one was biting at 90.00.\u00a0\u00a0 After a few texts back and forth we agreed and met up the next day.\u00a0 I handed him the cash and he handed me two dell OptiPlex 780 and surprisingly with two new in box keyboard\/mouse combos.<\/p>\n
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I got them home and fired them up and they ran great.\u00a0\u00a0 No fan noise, no error codes.\u00a0 Great!\u00a0 They both had win 7 pro COA.s so I slapped a fresh copy of win 7 on them and then burned them in for about 48 hours.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 They had both come with 4 gigs of ram and onboard AIT video chips, so I shopped around on amazon and got a deal on 2 x 8 gig ram kits for 60 total that brought them both up to 12 gigs and had an \u00a0older Nividia gt 510 and a Nividia GTX850\u00a0 video card lying about and put one in each.\u00a0 The cards weren\u2019t very good by todays standards, but they were a HUGE upgrade over the onboard ATI video systems and would allow me to run dual monitors.\u00a0 A desktop feature I am completely sold on.\u00a0\u00a0 I priced the cards on ebay and in total they are worth about 30.00.<\/p>\n
All in, I had two new Dell i5 dev systems for only 120.00.\u00a0\u00a0 Next I needed some monitors.\u00a0 I had a couple of Hannsg 19 inch LED monitors laying about, but I totally lucked out one day at the local Cat Thrift Store.<\/p>\n
Just down the street is the local cat shelter and they run a small thrift store on the side.\u00a0\u00a0 Every now-and-again I liked to stick my head in and play with the kitties and buy something to help the shelter buy cat food.\u00a0\u00a0 On day I stopped in that there were about 15 LCD monitors on the shelf.\u00a0 \u00a0I strolled over and eyeballed them and they had a mere $3.95 price tag on each of them.\u00a0 Now, I thought these would be blown monitors and probably not worth the trouble, but at this price, I had to take a chance and it did help feed the shelter cats.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 I had a sneaky suspicion these were the monitors from the same bank that upgraded an were from the i5\u2019s I just got.\u00a0\u00a0 I selected five monitors, all fairly nice ones.\u00a0\u00a0 22 to 24 inch and there was even a 24 inch 30 bit HP precision monitor.\u00a0\u00a0 This monitor alone must have been a few k when it was new, but was now sitting in the back of a small town, cat shelter.\u00a0 Such is the life of recycled computer equipment in the new digital age. All in for the five monitors I was into it for about $25.00<\/p>\n
Anyway, long story short, got the monitors home and they all fired up and worked perfectly.\u00a0\u00a0 There may be a slight red shift in the 24isnch soyo monitor, but all the dell monitors display perfectly.\u00a0 No blown pixels, nothing.\u00a0 A few dings on the cases, general wear and tear type of stuff, but nothing more.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Go figure.\u00a0\u00a0 Score one for the Cats!<\/p>\n
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I had an old two port netgear monitor switch laying about, so I rigged the i5s up with a 22 inch Dell LCD and the 24 inch Soyo and I could switch back and forth between the two with a slight push of the button. I figure that was worth about $30.00 or so.<\/p>\n
\u00a0<\/p>\n
I had also been watching ebay for a good-ish system.\u00a0 Sometimes you can find a real good deal and I stumbled across a Dell t3500 graphics workstation that had two, second gen i5 3.5 gihz CPUs, 20 gigs of ram, 2 terabytes of HD space and an higher end ATI card for $75.00.\u00a0\u00a0 The ad read well and there was a 30 day money back guarantee and the seller had hundreds of 4 star sales, so I took the chance and plunked down 75.00 bucks.\u00a0 I figured if this system worked, I could swap out the video card and it should be plenty powerful enough to run a RIFT or VIVE.\u00a0 I am particularly interested in using the Rift with Unity to actually build VR environments in VR.\u00a0\u00a0 I think that would be fun and this system should handle that easy enough.<\/p>\n
About a week later the system showed up and I fired it up and found out why the system was so cheap.\u00a0\u00a0 The system fired right up and didn\u2019t throw any errors, but after about ten minutes run time, the CPU fan kicked on and OH MY LORDS!!!!\u00a0 It really sounded like a MIG jet engine powering up.\u00a0 I mean, this thing is LOUD!\u00a0 I have actually never heard a computer this loud before in all my years.\u00a0 The bearing fan is blown, from running hard over the years I assume,\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 I contacted the seller and they were coolish about it and sent me a new fan and a tube of thermal paste.\u00a0\u00a0 I have yet to pull the old fan yet and replace.\u00a0 It\u2019s a dell case,\u00a0 famous for their strange overlapping engineering, so it will be an adventure in itself, taking the thing apart to get to the fan in question\u00a0 and experience has taught me I will need a youtube tap and a full day to accomplish this task.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 I will report back when I get the machine up.<\/p>\n
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I also needed a new home for all this equipment and found the solution on CL once again.\u00a0\u00a0 Somebody was clearing out their failed small business and I scored two slick and sleek matching computer desks and a Vizio 24 inch LCD tv all for another\u00a0 75.00.\u00a0 The tables have a few dings and scratches but were in great shape and all the equipment fits nicely.<\/p>\n
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I loaded up Unity 5.6.5f, an old copy of photoshop 7 that I paid for years ago and still does everything I need in a graphics program to do textures and graphics and the like and slapped in the newest version of Blender 3D to help do all the 3d modeling assets needed to Unity and I\u2019m up and running.<\/p>\n
Light bake render times now, with full high resolution, 40 trextels, 30 point lights , and final gather set, now only takes about 1-2 hours, instead of 72+ hours.\u00a0 The dual monitors are WAY more fun to work on then the one small 15 inch monitor on the laptop\u2026 and I have two system to bang away on, instead of just one, so that I can \u201cmultitask\u201d while one system is light baking, I can switch over to the other and continue working on another level, or even a completely different project.<\/p>\n
All in all, for a mere 360-ish bucks this was a HUGE upgrade and improvement in the dev process and frankly, I am kicking myself for not doing it sooner. \u00a0I\u2019m not so bogged down with the slow technology and It\u2019s now fun-ish again to do VR development.\u00a0 \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u2018Cause, as they say, \u201c if it\u2019s not at least a little fun, what\u2019s the point?\u201d<\/p>\n
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\u00a0<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
What 390.00 usd buys you for VR development. I have been banging away about 10 hours a, with development for Firedrake VR on a I3 Laptop for about seven months now.\u00a0\u00a0 In the beginning, when I first started learning Unity and developing Firedrake, I naively figured if I used a dev system that was \u201cequivalent\u201d […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":1423,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4,1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1422","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-featured","category-general"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/huesgfx.com\/firedrake\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1422","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/huesgfx.com\/firedrake\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/huesgfx.com\/firedrake\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/huesgfx.com\/firedrake\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/huesgfx.com\/firedrake\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1422"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/huesgfx.com\/firedrake\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1422\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1425,"href":"http:\/\/huesgfx.com\/firedrake\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1422\/revisions\/1425"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/huesgfx.com\/firedrake\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/1423"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/huesgfx.com\/firedrake\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1422"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/huesgfx.com\/firedrake\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1422"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/huesgfx.com\/firedrake\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1422"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}