Week 12

Caligraphy in VR

While my teammates were busy setting up the VR scene, I took the opportunity to delve deeper into potential VR interactions that could elevate our project. While having grabbable objects is a good start, I felt we could push the boundaries further to create a memorable experience. 

Yu and Aria suggested looking into Japanese calligraphy because this is one of the essential for elementary students in Japan. 

I found this VR game called "You, Calligrapher" which simulates the experience of traditional Chinese/Japanese calligraphy. It was rather impressive and I started looking up how we could achieve something similar.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9CbjNscEF4A

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mWWVrs4YGCE

Barely any tutorials covering VR calligraphy

I was surprised that basically, no tutorials about this subject can be found. The closest I came to was drawing in mid-air or drawing on a surface plane. Ended up following the tutorial on making a drawing canvas in VR because there's a whiteboard asset within out project scene. 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VAnBM18Q5Ow&t=226s

Back in Unity

The tutorial was about using an orthographic camera placed in front of the canvas. The camera will capture any visible object and then send the graphic to a Render Texture that's linked to the base material of the drawing canvas. Resulting in brush trails on the canvas.

Setting up the camera as a child object of the whiteboard object

Scaling the camera to fit the whiteboard surface

Setting up the Render Texture and adjusting the size to fit the aspect ratio of the whiteboard

Failed to attempt to follow the tutorial, the camera was affecting the whole whiteboard prefab instead of only the drawing area.

I tried following suggestions from the comment sections of the said YouTube tutorial but yet failed to create a satisfied result using this method. We might need to ditch this interactable if I can't resolve this problem. But I'll say it was a good idea a attempt.