Thanks for all your comments.
Regarding the inclusion in Blender and licensing issues, this is exactly why we (had to) choose this way of implementing it as a separate library from Blender and why we DON’T put the BlenderXR files into the Blender binary folder ourselves but ask users to do that themselves:
we avoid GPL troubles by keeping a layer between Blender and the respective device APIs
we make it clear that BlenderXR (the library to use VR headsets) is just a temporary solution until OpenXR will be available.
The user interface itself is in the Blender code, fully device independent and under GLP
It would even be possible to accept the user interface changes into Blender without accepting BlenderXR: just disable loading the library. Then the VR UI would be “dead code” until OpenXR would become available. But of course that’s not my decision to make.
May I ask, how do you deal with huge scenes and it´s possible performance impact to avoid bad framerate and motion sickness?
This is one thing that worries me about having VR inside Blender, probably the biggest concern for me, because functionality can come, and other things can be done, but performance to avoid motion sickness could be a problem, specially when you have scene in blender itself that kill the viewport framerate, how can you “disengage” the VR framerate from the viewport framerate so you don´t get sick?
Thanks and great initiative!
You should talk with @ pepeland I know he was investigating possibilities for the future and this
Sorry for the late response.
Based on our experience with making MARUI for Maya we have some automatic performance adjustments that we can use, but we also learned NOT to restrict the user in terms of scene size or render settings too much.
The reason is that people and use cases are very different.
Some people get sick easily when the framerate drops, others are less affected.
Some people need to stay and work in VR for ours, working on raw asset geometry and don’t care about shading. Others just want a quick 5-second look of how the scene would look like in the game with all settings set to high-fidelity.
It is really better to leave it to the user to decide and just give them all the settings and information they need in an easy-to-use way.
Thanks for directing us to Pepeland. He actually already knows about BlenderXR and was so nice to make a video where he was trying out his Grease Pencil in VR:
I was asking that to know if you execute the Vr part in a separate thread so you can separate the Blender performance from the VR performance.
Another great feature to have, and I don´t know if you can implement it, at least as an option, is Fixed Foveated Rendering, for HMD´s without Eye tracking, in the end the only place in the lens were we can correctly see the scene is in the center, so Fixed Foveated Rendering could help A LOT with performance without the user noticing it.
Thanks for your work, I still have to try it, but I´m very excited with it
Another question, does it work with Shift+Z? (with Cycles viewport rendering).
@JuanGea
I’m very sorry for the inconvenience!
Could you please let us know which VR head-set and OS you were using so we can find the problem and fix it?
Best regards,
Max
@JuanGea
I’m very sorry for the delay. We have tried different set-ups here but could not reproduce the problem.
We’ll keep at it and hopefully can fix it soon.
In the meantime we have build a custom version of BlenderXR_SteamVR.dll for you that flips the eyes (defining the left eye as right and right eye as left. https://drive.google.com/file/d/1lCZjcV0pkrrJ7LTBeyFdVTDJ9IMqTmao/view?usp=sharing
I hope this will allow you to try out the VR UI for now.
Best regards,
Max
I just found this thread.
This would be great! We use Blender at work (in product development), but also use VR. The two haven’t been compatible before, we always had to go through Unity.
If we could see a Blender scene directly in VR, especially since we have Eevee, that would be amazing! I’m going to try the links you provided and give feedback.
Wow! I have tried it with two computers. One works well, I can view a full Eevee scene in VR. I use a Microsoft MR headset with a layer of SteamVR on top.
On the other computer, the connection to the headset is very bad, the pictures jumps around erratically. And not because of how much geometry is shown, even simple scenes are like that. Interestingly, the Blender VR window that is open parallel, shows smooth motion. Also, I have had several crashes on both PCs.
This definitely has potential. I would suggest that you also post it on blenderartists.org, that way you can get more attention and hopefully more support.
Thanks so much for trying it out and sorry for those issues!
We’ll try to fix them ASAP!
Could you please let us know a bit more about the differences between the machines so that we can reproduce the issues here?
@JuanGea
Sorry for the long delay. We finally were able to reproduce the issue.
It happens if you don’t have / use the normal Blender viewport camera when you open the VR Window.
We’re still trying to fix it, but in the meantime, please just add a normal Blender viewport camera to use when you open the VR window.
Sorry again for the delay. It was causing us some headaches but in the new version we released last week the problem should be fixed.
Please let us know if you still encounter it.
Thank you so much for sharing!
Actually, we had already reached the funding goal before but some Backers disappear or reduced their amount later, so we fell back to 50% again.
Anyway, the more we raise the more we can focus on BlenderXR development and make faster progress.
