BRCvr Behind the Scenes

BRCvr Behind the Scenes is an AltspaceVR tribute world based on experiences leading up to BRCvr 2021.

The inspiration for this “vignette world” occurred when Doug Jacobson from BRCvr conveyed his story via Discord of enduring a major power outage just before the official launch of BRCvr 2021. In the spirit of “when it rains it pours” the story includes use of a generator for laptop power and a phone for internet access all while navigating the moving target of “The Great AltspaceVR Update of 2021” – fortunately the Altspace update was not scheduled to happen until after the event – but pulling together the virtual Burning Man event was challenge enough.

This world was an exercise in completely modeling, texturing and lighting a mini AltspaceVR world from the ground up. All models were created from scratch in Blender, the textures in Photoshop and final assembly and lighting in Unity.

Sound was scrounged from the inter-webs, cut into a loop and placed as 3D spacialized audio for the generator.

Baking the lightmap was particularly challenging in that the shadow cast by the card table was absolutely horrible on the first couple of tries.

After much trial and error I ultimately discovered that it was because I had removed the underside face of the card table in an attempt at pre-mature optimization. Once the underside face of the table was restored and the lighting re-baked all was well with the world.

This was a great exercise in world creation after only starting this VR journey a couple of months ago.