Building your own 3d world - a walk in the park

Picture the scene - it's New Year's day and you want to go for a walk in a park but don't actually want to get ready and go out. There's only one thing to do - build your own green space to navigate using the Oculus Rift.

Having watched this Unity with Oculus Rift DK2 tutorial, we felt compelled to have a go straight away and see if it inspires us further (it does)

Here's a short video of our very first Oculus-friendly world (1:08)

Things wot I learned

• It's expensive to use Unity the way they mention in the tutorial - but it's exciting how simple it is to get started. 
• It's tiring on the eyes to play in your world so we had to cut it short.
• No need to reinvent the wheel for some of the scenes - I used the Tuscany Demo to make the scene (large file rather than the small one used in the tutorial)

Todo

• Need to do more of the tutorials to get a hang of the textures available, and how to make my own 
• Need to find out more about the scripting language
• Need to check out the other game engines or things we can use to interact with the Oculus Rift - the Oculus site has integrations with other 3d software which I need to check out
• Start the project we dreamed of having done this! Very excited.

Portraits are hard

Here's three attempts at the same picture and they still don't quite look like the person.

Doggie

First drawing of 2015

Dog

Scary squirrel

Pencil and watercolours - worse for wear

Commuter

Roundup

Tried using the classes and styles to inspire myself in sketching in between courses.

Scene from a restaurant

Single line drawing

Biro drawings

Cartoon-like calendar

A graphic icon

Charcoal portraits - a start

Prompted by Capturing Likeness with Gary Faigin (a short short, free course on Craftsy) I had a go.
He shows you that contrary to what you may expect you can get the eyes, ears and mouth totally wrong and still have a recognisable portrait. Consider a blurry old group photo and remember that you can actually recognise each person (if you know them) or tell them all apart anyway. This attitude helps you get started very quickly. The success I had was varied but the success is in taking away the fear.