While most of our Oculus Rift projects involve custom development of 3D assets (and we have an outstanding team of developers for the same), we are often able to lower the cost of our services by incorporating 3rd party content offered by sites like the Unity Asset Store and Turbosquid. By leveraging high quality assets from those sites, we can augment our projects with supporting props (otherwise known as ‘entourage’ in the arch viz world), environment assets, or even fully functional interactive systems available on the Unity Asset Store.
As we build storyboards and animatics of Oculus Rift experiences we’re developing, we often draw upon these vast pools of existing resources to help visualize what the final application will look like. It also helps build excitement, allowing our clients to share a preliminary draft of our work to build internal support and anticipation of the final deliverable. Reviewing a written script, or even a storyboard with images, doesn’t come close to what it’s like to put on the Oculus Rift to see firsthand how the scene transitions, timing and animation will be choreographed to create a powerful, jaw-dropping virtual reality experience.
In the above image, we were able to use an Oil Rig developed by 3D_Garden, to create a demo experience for the Oculus Rift. This could be used to showcase the potential of virtual reality and Oculus Rift around oil & gas and other energy sector applications.
In the past, we’ve also made use of Michael O’s Middle-East Environment for various military demos, for use in training, simulation and visualization. We add custom and other prefab assets to these base scenes in order to create complete applications or demos around the specific needs of individual clients.
Of course, not all 3rd party assets are created equal. On Turbosquid, many of the assets are aren’t the best quality, or even completely unusable. As such, it can prove to be a costly gamble in some cases if you don’t know what to look for or how to vet assets to find only the highest quality material. If you do purchase an asset that isn’t the best quality, both the Unity Asset Store and Turbosquid offer outstanding support. Also, for small individual prop assets to support scenes, it’s often quicker to develop custom assets from scratch than to search through various 3rd party resources to find exactly what you’re looking for. But when all you need is quick demo materials, or a relatively complex scene where existing assets happen to be available, Turbosquid and the Unity Asset Store are powerful tools.
Together, this workflow helps speed up our development time, reduces the cost of our services, and enables us to quickly generate powerful demo experiences when we’re pitching a project idea to a new client.
If you’re interested in working with Arch Virtual to create a virtual reality experience for Oculus Rift, send us a note!
