In our upcoming eight-part explainer series we’ll learn how to set up Unity to send 3d scenes to a Quest headset, add animated people and vehicles to the city and import sound. We’re going to use various FREE assets as well as four paid assets from the Unity asset store.
You can find the four paid assets detailed below. There’s no need to purchase them until you’ve seen them in context. At regular price, purchasing all four will cost around 97 GBP / 120 USD, though watch for regular Unity asset store sales. Unity itself is free for non-commercial use.
1: VRIF: The ‘Virtual Reality Interaction Framework’
For our VR character to interact fully with the environment, we need interactions! This can include picking up and moving objects or weapons, opening doors, teleporting from one location to another, or even whooshing down a zip line! VRIF includes these interactions and many more!
The installation and use of VRIF is central to this series of explainers and we’ll use it from explainer two onwards. Check out the current price of VRIF.
2: SYNTY Low-poly city
‘Low poly’ is a popular gaming aesthetic style, born out of the early 3d games of the late eigthies and early nineties. Today, using simple geometry and ‘blocky’ designs is a style choice, and is popular in VR due to the limited processing power of standalone headsets including the Quest series. In this explainer series we’re going to use this lowpoly city asset from Synty, but the workflow process will be exactly the same if you’d rather have a neon city or western outpost! You’ll need one of these assets to follow along with explainer three onwards.
3: Low poly animated people
There are numerous ways to bring a VR environment to life. We’ve chosen this pack of 100 characters, which includes automated animations, to populate our city streets!
This asset is not essential to help build the VR city and is relevant only to explainer five. You could just watch the explainer and return to it later on!
4: DOTween Pro
We use this asset to create ‘waypoint’ animation so a police car can rush round a city loop – See the preview video at the bottom of this post! DOTween Pro lets us visually draw a path and tweak it as needed. There are numerous waypoint animation assets on the Unity asset store so feel free to shop around. Dotween Pro offers more functionality than we’ll use in this series, so be sure to check out what else it can do if you do purchase it!
The explainer series starts on 6 May and continues every Monday, Wednesday and Friday until the project is complete 🙂 As a reminder, here’s a peek at how your VR city could look…
