Oculus Story Studio’s VR Trailer Source Assets Released!

Hey everyone!
We wanted to start a thread where we could share the VR Trailer, share the unreal project, and have a definitive place to interact with the community. Admittedly, this is a scary moment for us at Story Studio: we don’t know how this will work out, how people will react, and we’re sort of “baring our soul to the world” in a way. However, our mission is to Inspire and Educate and we feel strongly that releasing this project is one of the best ways to do execute on that vision. If you have any questions or problems - please post here! We will be checking this from time to time…but please be mindful that we are a small team and can barely act on all of our own grandiose ideas (much less support an entire community!).

We hope that what we share here helps give you an idea of how we structure our projects. Most importantly, we hope that all of the technologists and artists currently sitting on the sidelines wondering “Should I get into VR?” will dig through this project and say “…dude I could totally make this!”

So have at it!

CG Supervisor
Oculus Story Studio
@distastee

The animation and lighting is amazing… the whole experience (albeit short) is quite polished.

What’s the estimated play through duration for this?

WOW cool. I am downloading this now. This is a great way to start my Friday ;).

Thank you so much for releasing this, definitely the best character animation i’ve seen in VR.

As Carmack mentioned yesterday we should all be paying more attention to this aspect of real-time graphics. Will download and study for sure!

Is the Git address working for everyone else? No luck with it.

Have you linked your Unreal Engine account to your Github account ? Are you able to access https://github.com/EpicGames/UnrealEngine ? Did you log into Github.com first then attempt to access https://github.com/oculusstorystudio-vr/UnrealEngine ?

Hope this helps.

Wow. What a kind contribution and such a humble statement. Oculus Story Studio, ***'s Story ***will be the as seminal and significant as the first Toy Story.

Thank you! It was only 2 animators and 2 lighters (all 4 extremely talented!) This is about 1 minute long I think…the full experience is about 10 minutes long.

Thank you! That’s VERY kind of you to say - but I don’t think ANYONE has made something of that magnitude yet.

To take the Pixar analogy further: I think VR as a whole is still at the “Andre and Wally B.” stage. We’re still just trying to make a “Luxo Jr.”

Now, I wish I have some VR gear :confused: … I’m missing out!

Oh I thought it was feature length… No worries, I’m sure you all will get there soon. :slight_smile:

Very nice to have someone from Oculus Story on these forums.

I asked on Reddit, and from OSS said he’s ask about the reasoning on Monday, but I was wondering why source needed to be modified in order to control 's gaze. Couldn’t UE4 handle bone rotations via blueprint out of the box?

Given this is chorne… perhaps this is :wink:

Hi, I’m , and have been devoted to VR in UE4 since both came out. Thanks for posting all of this. I’m busy building all the stuff now to take a look.

Thanks. Had unreal and git previously, just hadn’t linked them.

Whenever I follow step 6 on the readme:
“After compiling finishes, you can load the editor from Visual Studio by setting your startup project to UE4 and pressing F5 to debug.”
I get this dialog.

529177df7f9919ed25ebecdb5e1678f79874b78b.jpeg

I say yes to rebuild, wait 40 min, and it opens the project browser of 4.9, with the project telling me it’s 4.7. I try to open the project, and it tells me to make a copy, I do, and it fails due to a missing dll.

What am I missing?

After running Setup.bat and GenerateProjectFiles.bat… If you already built UE4, then Debug, if it wants to rebuild I usually say “No”. When you open the project, try “Convert in place”. It will then compile then you should be able to see the project, etc.

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Hi I got it to compile but Im only seeing the trailer I thought the whole short was posted :confused:

I restarted from scratch, and got to the same point. However this time, when it warned me that the dll was missing, it successfully created it. I finally have it functioning. Awesome. Much to learn. I also had an issue where the project was opening in another version of the Engine on my machine, so I had to manually point the project to the included version.

Thanks again for putting this out there. I know it’s difficult to account for everyone’s setup, and this isn’t a polished release… but there’s plenty going on even in this one-shot trailer to glean ideas. The character of himself is quite a little machination;) Kudos!

I believe the whole short is only out in Q1 2016 with Oculus Rift CV1 launch :slight_smile:

Check out the Pinata, the extra props are quite nice, in addition to of course the amazing character animation.

From some of the videos released it looks like one of the scenes in the short film will be celebrating his birthday all by himself, replete with banner, cake, pinata, etc. Poor :frowning:

Woa, really inspiring stuff! Great work!
May I ask are the engine changes made by OSS to UE4’s SkeletalMeshComponent planned to be merged to the main branch at some point? These are quite useful to have in general.
Thanks

Man I love THIS!!!
Thanks for sharing

Yep! Same dude. Crossposting my response here as well for anyone who has the same question:

For the trailer: it actually wasnt necessary. For main experience: the stopgap port of matinee from ue3 to ue4 is kinda incomplete because the’yre planning on doing sequencer. Sequencer will allow blending - matinee doesnt. We could have made henry a blueprint to fix this problem - but because we wanted to continue to support scrubbing in matinee (so that our lighters could actually light) we decided against a blueprint henry. The code change allows us to manually write to bone transforms, which we store in a table and look up from during certain points of the experience.
For the trailer - we decided to use henry as a blueprint (and have a duplicate non-blueprint Henry so lighting could get a preview). Trailer henry uses an aim grid that does multiple bone transforms - so his tracking is actually much higher quality.
Thanks for the great question! I actually learned a lot listening to our engineer talk about the tech. Such a smart dude. Keep 'em coming.