Recently, I’ve spent a few hours with Unity’s new animation system, Mecanim. I wasn’t working on any complex animations, but only wanted to implement fading of a few elements in my scene. This turned out to be a real desaster. Why? For simply fading a property in an out, I needed two animation clips and four states, with pretty sensitive transition setup (I wanted the fading to be interruptible, etc.)The…

The 3D Text asset built into Unity renders always on top, regardless of z depth. This helps to avoid z-fighting issues, if your text is coplanar to other geometry in the scene, but often not what you want. I have labels in my scene which I DO want to be hidden by geometry in front. Unfortunately, there is no simple switch to turn on depth testing – even though users…

Today I’ve taken the time to clean up the architecture of my VR stars Unity app (I really have to find a name for this project!). One really cool Unity feature is the ability to create custom assets by scripts run in the editor, so you don’t have to build complex structures at runtime. Why is this so fantastic? Well, usually I would read star positions, constellation data, etc. from…

I’m currently experimenting with the UI for my upcoming Gear VR star gazing application. Virtual reality user interfaces are really interesting, since they have to work so differently from a standard 2D UI. One possible realization is to have interactive elements as actual 3D objects in the scene. This can be fun! For my app, I am thinking about putting a “time machine” into the scene, which will allow you…