What are 3D Graphics?
3D Models for Virtual Reality
课程 2（共 5 门，Specialization Virtual Reality）
This course will begin your journey to creating Virtual Reality experiences. A Virtual Reality experience is a new world that you step into and are entirely immersed in. Creating a VR experience means creating that world and all the objects in it. In this course you will learn the basics of 3D graphics: how we create objects and how to lay them out to create an environment. You will learn techniques like materials and texturing that make your objects appear realistic. You will also learn about audio techniques to ensure that your experiences sound great as well as looking great. In all of these topics we will pay attention to the particular requirements of Virtual Reality, including pitfalls and performance issues: making sure your environment runs fast enough in VR. You will learn all of this using the professional game and VR engine, Unity3D. Unity is one of the most used game engine and is a relatively easy, but fully featured, introduction to 3D development. The course will culminate in a project in which you will create your own VR scene. VR development is something you can only learn by doing it yourself, so working on your project will be the best way to learn.
This week you will begin developing 3D Virtual Reality Environments. We will cover the basics of 3D graphics, including a number of 3D engines and development environments that you can use. We will particularly focus on the Unity3D engine.
What are 3D Graphics?1:36
Dr Sylvia Xueni Pan
Lecturer, Department of Computing
Dr Marco Gillies
Computing Department, Goldsmiths, University of London
Currently, the only way to create
fully immersive interactive virtual reality experiences that you can
step into and interact with is to use 3D computer graphics.
Computer graphics is the process of taking representation of objects and worlds that are
entirely on the computer and using them to
create potentially highly realistic and compelling images.
Though these images can also be very abstract and cartoony, if you like,
the basic principle of computer graphics is that we
represent objects and environments as computer files,
primarily as a bunch of numbers.
I will talk later about exactly what that means, but for now,
think of it as the computer's way of understanding an object that is in 3D,
that has height, width, depth and volume.
The process of computer graphics, called rendering,
is to turn these 3D representations into 2D images
that can be viewed on a computer screen or in our case, a head-mounted display.
Luckily, for us, this process of rendering is handled by
modern computer graphics hardware and very sophisticated graphics software.
VR creators don't have to think very much at
all about how the objects are turned into images.
Our jobs as creators is to create those representations of 3D objects,
and the next part of the course,