No scene environment (HDR) / Color / any kind of background in VR?!

[mhazani]

Hiya,

So, I created a nice, subtle HDR for my scene background (it's set in space). In normal view it looks like this:

However, when I enter VR mode, everything good in the world disappears!

This persists whether I try one of the existing HDRs, or even a simple color. Am I to understand that the environment feature isn't supported in VR yet? It's kind of a huge deal, especially if you want to display literally any kind of environment...

Encountering this on WebVR (Firefox).

Help / clarification would be appreciated!

[stephomi]

For now, we force a grey color.

The reason behind is that most people don't set the scene with VR in mind, and the default environments or some very strong color looked really terrible/weird in VR.

We'll very probably add an option soon for the user to state that the background VR should be the same as in non VR.

[mhazani]

Thanks for the response, @stephomi. Your explanation makes sense, but I'm still left wondering - is there any way to temporarily provide (perhaps on a probationary per-request basis) a bypass for that particular lock?

As you probably know, one of the current community contests - a hugely popular one, I think - is all about creating immersive movie-inspired scenes with VR particularly in mind. As of the time of writing there are ~50 entries and there's almost a month to go - a lot of people are very interested in making things for it. The end results would surely bolster Sketchfab's VR catalog which - last time I checked - could really use it (~24 or so entries in the VR portal?).

Why not take this opportunity, when so many people are passionately dedicated to generating new VR content on Sketchfab, and provide them with the tools they need to make it great? HDRi environments are one of those things that can make or break immersion. I, for one, would hate to put disclaimers on my scene along the lines of "due to sketchfab's current limitations...", especially if the limitations are the result of a decision rather than a tech gap.

Anyway, just thinking out loud. I'm sure a lot of us would appreciate the ability to do so and make an even stronger case to paying $120 to continue the Pro membership past the contest.

(CC @bartv who seems to be particularly involved with that contest.)

Thanks again!

[stephomi]

The end results would surely bolster Sketchfab's VR catalog which - last time I checked - could really use it (~24 or so entries in the VR portal?).

What VR portal are you talking about? Every model on sketchfab can be viewed in VR.
If you are referring to the VR Sketchfab apps, we won't maintain those (as it was rather a sneak peak of what we wanted to achieve in sketchfab.com, with everyone models instead of a carefully cooked ones).

I don't want to give an ETA, but the option to use vr background (color/hdr) is very likely to be released this week, mainly for the contest indeed.

[mhazani]

I meant the website mentioned here, although in retrospect I see this is just a collection - I thought it was supposed to have been the main portal a-la Steam VR.

That's fantastic news, really glad to hear that! Thanks to you and everyone at Sketchfab for being on top of things and attentive to the community's needs! Much appreciated:)

[stephomi]

For now you can add ?vr_background=1 at the end of the url to force the background in VR.
We'll add an option in the vr tab editor to automate that soon.

[mhazani]

Excellent, that's very helpful, thank you!

Another VR question - is there a way of making the floor transparent? I'm having a hard time making it work in my scene, since my scene is a 360 degree sphere. If I push it all the way to the bottom it makes the traveling speed super-fast, too fast to actually move around comfortably. But obviously if the floor is closer to eye level, the sphere gets cut off...

The scene is here:

Ivory Tower Full Scene WIP #4 by mhazani on Sketchfab

I'd love any and all ideas you might have re. optimizing the VR experience, especially in that regard. It's still unoptimized with an obscene 1.2M polycount, which I'll definitely address later. But any tips re. the scale and floor positioning would be highly appreciated - I've played around quite a bit with both and haven't found a satisfactory solution that really creates an immersive feeling, which still lets the Ivory Tower be up front and center (and easily navigable).

And thanks again for patching the VR background, it really helps!

[mhazani]

Hi @stephomi - any update on this feature's integration?

[stephomi]

On the next release, probably today.

[stephomi]

It's live!

[mhazani]

Awesome, thanks for all your hard work!

[steren]

Most of my models for which I enabled the background in VR work pretty well.

I'd encourage considering having it enabled by default: With the floor, the background becomes some kind of a skybox. And I feel a lot of sketchfab models take the background as a component of their style.