2 to 4 December 2020 – Virtuality Experience Online (PC, Mac, Oculus Quest)
There may be members interested in these trends
2 Likes
Cool, thanks! Just signed up, let’s see if my application goes through.
1 Like
Hi @ville,
I remember your very attractive and successful fair project
You also had an announcement of the event, but I don’t remember that link.
I am thinking about the idea involved in preparing for this new fair. Specifically: they prepare the visitor to fit into the new virtual environment, how to move, how to activate hot spots, etc. After that, the visitors will be focused on the events on the stage, when the fair is launched.
If I were to apply this to my desire to make a grand opening of an exhibition of artwork by an artist, I would have to make an initial scene with covered statues and paintings.
What is your opinion on that?
@jorgearq, what are your experiences with visitors to your fair?
Has anyone else signed up for this upcoming fair?
Heey, I’ve actually been thinking of a thread here in the forums that would gather all the Shapespark fair people and help us all share ideas. Could this be it?
I’ve been fiddling around with the same problem. With that wedding fair we had a separate landing page with all the directions (how to moves etc.) needed. The unfortunate thing however is that most people don’t actually have the tenacity to read complete sentences anymore so this way did not really work.
The more recent Healthcare ICT fair can be found here: 3D scene With this one we are using billboard type of simple directions and also have that separate landing page + I recorded half a dozen educational youtube videos for the exhibitors to watch months prior to the show. This way worked a lot better but according to the feedback is still not perfect. Well, to be honest, it only takes around 30 seconds for the younger generations to start using Q & E to fly around while the more mature ones often get stuck in the beginning frame.
Anyhow, the model opens up to an initial scene a bit like you mentioned. It is meant to be highly accessible and serve as both educational lobby and a hub that gathers all 4 fair halls + every exhibitors own showroom to a single “hub”. The entirety consists of 40+ scenes so some confusion I guess is unavoidable. I’d happily welcome any ideas on how to make it better since the fair is running till the end of April. The next goal here is to monetize from the exhibitors own “showrooms” by enhancing them and creating unique branded content-rich meeting environments.
The next thing we’ve been planning to implement is changing the cover.jpg file with a darkened screen (see our 360 project: Xera Living) filled with directions and maybe a link to a youtube iframe with everything explained.
I hope this helps and at least somehow answered your question.
3 Likes
Thank you and likewise! I feel like we have yet just scratched the surface of different possibilities with our projects. In the future I’d hope to be able to display awesome looking work like the work you guys are producing. We do have a lot to learn though.
1 Like
My experience in Fairs has been exclusive with a company from Saudi Arabia, they have a platform with several years of experience to show content and my contribution has been a bit of realism and the possibility of giving dynamism to the user experience because of the pandemic.
The possibilities are many but the limitations are also, the interactions that for us are obvious are not for the new users and they must be very intuitive because otherwise the users simply leave.
Many are the small actions that can help in a journey but must focus on preventing the user from being trapped not knowing what to do.
Some of the implementations that have worked very well for us are
- when you touch one you can generate a scene change (pre-recorded scene but not shown in the side list) so that the user is correctly positioned in front of the image and does not lose the focus of attention. You can see this in the corridor images of this tour https://all360.shapespark.com/ttp_interacoustic_v1/#autoplay
- place invisible barriers to avoid entering places without content, this is not infallible because when you go down floor levels the user can bite from a distance and overcome the barrier, for that is point 3 see this discussion I can pass trough invisible (and visible) barrier!
- define a minimum distance to the surfaces that is greater than the standard, this is the link to how this is done [quote=“jan, post:2, topic:1446”]
Tomorrow we will release a change that adds support for settingWALK.KEY_MOVE_MIN_DISTANCE_TO_OBSTACLE. It will allow you to limit how close you can walk to obstacles without affecting trigger click detection (for now this will be available only in Shapespark hosting so you will need to upload the scene to test it).
[/quote]) - generate a short list of scenes but easily relocate the lost user.
- place control buttons on demonstration videos so they can have audio included, that audio is normally a welcome or location video. We can place videos as textures but they will not have audio, this only happens when we place a button to control that video, this can be seen in the images of the corridor of this tour https://all360.shapespark.com/ttp_interacoustic_v1/#autoplay
- the location map is good only when the spaces are small, but we still can’t make the red dot more evident, that would be a big help! Another one to locate the participants is to make an orbital view with the spaces and place the names of the spaces so they can go to them easily. You can see this here Room names in top and orbit views
We are currently experimenting with videos with transparent backgrounds, because that would allow us to have a host directly on the scene talking to the user in the first person. Or what is even more interesting, giving a talk directly on the stage space, however we have not yet mastered this technique. You can see this here That one person can control the triggers for everyone in the same meeting - #4 by jorgearq
3 Likes
Congrats on a wonderful show! Very nicely done. I’d love to hear how you managed to keep it the experience so smooth with all the plants, 3D people and so on?
Nice points. I’ll have to dig in to these.
1 Like
Greetings @ville
to make the scene flow with 3D elements such as plants and people:
- I keep the quality settings to a minimum, the render is almost always draft or less!
- in the objects tab under the lightmap resolution apply 50% of plants and characters.
- I apply camera filters inside the camera tab in the color maps section (LUT´s filters) and also
- I apply camera volumes to control the brightness when moving from an outside space to an inside space.
But you should always limit the use of these elements because it adds to the amount of polygons! It’s a game of balance.
2 Likes
Hi @jorgearq,
I’ve never tried LUT at Shapespark. I have read about them and I know that they use them in renderings and especially in film production (fantastic possibilities). What exactly do you achieve with them at Shapespark?
Hello @Vladan, several months ago I put this PNG LUTs, how to creat and use it in shapespark, I think it can give you a general idea and also get the LUTs from the list.
How do I use them? I simply choose one of the luts depending on the effect I want to give to the scene, but in general, I like very much the LUT_Filmic9.png, which gives the scene a warmer air.
3 Likes
@jorgearq, from the performance perspective you don’t have to worry about all of these points:
The number of samples doesn’t impact performance, so you can bake using high number of samples. (though, the Lightmap resolution and Max lightmaps do impact memory consumption and may impact performance)
These two shouldn’t cause any noticeable drop in performance, either.
Thanks @wojtek, for the clarifications. Now that you mention it you are right 
, these things that I do don’t affect the final performance of the scene, I believe that rather they are tips of how to improve the scene in simple visual terms (3 and 4) and on the other hand in time of rendering (1)
Rather, the performance of the scene has to do directly with the amount of triangles and surfaces! In that case what you have to do is clean the scene of all irrelevant surfaces before exporting to shapespark.
Regarding to this
Do you have a comparison table that allows us to choose the optimal combination of number of surfaces / lightmap resolution / max lightmaps to ensure good performance?
1 Like
@jorgearq, if you target desktop and mobile devices, or if the loading time is important, it’s best to fit the scene in 3M triangles and 2 lightmaps.
For desktops the advised limits are higher: 5M triangles and 3-4 lightmaps should work well on average laptops with integrated graphics cards, though the scene may take some time to load.
1 Like
@wojtek one question:
If we reduce the opacity of the glass on the windows to 0 during baking, do the glass surfaces enter in the lightmap? This is important for skyscrapers.
Setting the opacity to 0 will still make the lightmap to be baked for such an object. To avoid including an object type in the lightmap set Custom lightmap resolution to 0 for the object type.
2 Likes
Thank you @wojtek, your advice is very useful.
Glass is often made as a thin box and has a large surface area in multi-storey buildings. This is a similar situation with invisible barriers.
Fewer such areas in the light map either reduce its number or improve the quality of the shadows of other objects in the scene.
1 Like