Creating AR/VR Experiences | Ep 1: Intro to Amazon Sumerian

[Music] hi everyone my name is Jake's mr. and I am the creative content specialist for Amazon Sumerian and this is one of the first well is the first AWS twitch broadcast we're making from the Sumerian team and we are really excited to start sharing with you guys Sumerian what it can do what it's used for and just how powerful of a tool it is today I'm joined by our lead product manager Ben Moore go ahead and say hello Ben hey guys nice to see you yeah ben is here he's gonna be doing a walkthrough actually not a walkthrough he's gonna be doing a presentation on what Sumerian is and then when he is done I'm gonna be doing a walkthrough of the UI and the user interface the tool itself how to create a basic simple scene and then how to publish that scene so we are really excited to get going this is excited to have a weekly series that we're kicking off here this Tuesday afternoon I will be moderating and handling the chat channel while Ben is presenting and vice-versa so yeah any questions are welcome we're really really excited for this so Ben are you ready I'm ready thanks Jake yeah appreciate it well everyone really appreciate being on today extremely excited to be giving this presentation on Amazon Sumerian like Jake said earlier this is a weekly series you can get more information at aws.amazon.com slashed which you'll see upcoming episodes there learn a little bit more about what we're going to talk about but today our main goal is to give you kind of an introduction on what Sumerian is how we think about it and then do that walkthrough with Jake and I'm really excited I think you guys are gonna learn a lot here so the first thing I want to talk about is a little bit of what you're gonna walk away with from what I'm talking about and you know really that is a basic understanding of how we view the AR and VR development pipeline and how we see Sumerian fitting into that and why we're focused on web browsers so much and then after that we'll talk a little bit about the difference between augmented reality and virtual reality and you know what the spectrum of realities actually means we'll talk some about why we're focused on more than gaming I know that's a little bit crazy to say on twitch but but we think that there are some use cases out there that that go beyond this I'll give an overview of Sumerian itself we'll talk about how it integrates with AWS and and then finally we'll finish up with a little bit about our Sumerian host character system and how we can drive characters dynamically using some of our voice AI so with that being said let's get started you know the real question is is what does it take for a customer to be able to build an AR and VR application and honestly there are a lot of steps in talking with customers we often find that they don't have the skills for 3d development and that they're learning these types of things on the job and as you can see you're talking about coming up with an idea figuring out which types of frameworks you're gonna use you're talking about actually defining a platform and then developing that platform and then how or developing for that platform and then how you're gonna publish and so this is just a lot a lot of steps that people don't necessarily have in from experience in and what we're talking about right now is for just one platform that gets the difficulty gets increased significantly as you start talking about the melihat to be building for when you're you're taking AR and VR and immersive 3d applications into consideration and so it starts to look a lot more like what you're seeing on your screen and you know a lot of these devices require a lot more than just working on one development environment you know for instance some of them require a our kit as an application for iOS maybe you need to get into Xcode to start to build that actual you know a our experience for an iPhone or an iPad so we really look at this as an opportunity for AWS to pick up some of the heavy lifting on behalf of our customers and make this development pipeline a little bit easier so what we're looking at doing is simplifying the experience essentially we want to be able to let you take your idea get building using nothing more than a browser and get your application to your customers immediately so we simplify this process so you can focus essentially and you know the question is is how how are we're able to do this how can we make the process much simpler with Sumerian and we're using a web specification called WebEx R to do that and you know we're building Sumerian from the ground up with WebEx our in mind this started with web VR which was a framework that allowed for head-mounted displays or HMDs to be used through a web browser so you could you could plug your oculus rift or your HTC vive directly into your laptop and view and experience from a compatible browser like Firefox or Chrome web XR is a spec that that was proposed by Mozilla it's working its way through the w3c at this point that's the world wide web consortium and the goal is to basically abstract the api's that interact with hardware so that developers can write their own write write write an experience essentially that is using common languages found in web development so WebEx are runs in your browser you can simply open a URL and jump right into VR with with any hmd or you can experience AR with any web ar enabled phone which is a lot of them today so what does WebEx are do it exposes things like 3d sound ap is for controllers surface data to anchor 3d objects augmented reality and you know it's also a great acronym because the X is actually the algebraic variable so you know you know having WebEx are and having samarium built on top of it is is a really great way for people to build a wide range of immersive applications so let's talk a little bit about the difference between AR and VR in in 1994 there was a spectrum that was defined called the virtuality continuum it's a continuous spectrum that ranges from what's totally real which you can see on the left hand side - what's completely virtual and you know what I mean by that is with an AR application the what you see on your device whether it's a mobile device is mostly the real world and there's a little bit of digital content that's overlaid on top of that or in a VR use case you're completely immersed there's nothing about the real world around you that you're actually aware of so typically customers are targeting their applications somewhere along this spectrum and in the middle is where virtual objects or augmented our physical spaces can be considered to be the sweet spot and that is going to help this go mainstream so essentially AR is where we see the real value of this making itself available to consumers in the real world so let's take an example of types of applications or use cases that we're seeing with Sumerian so we're seeing a lot of experience based applications VR can help you experience a place that's out of physical reach or based in Seattle the Amazon campus has these very large spheres that have been built recently that that house a ecosystem of plants but if you don't live in Seattle how how can you actually experience that well VR is actually a really good way to do that and you can imagine walking through this space in full VR experiencing what it is actually like seeing annotations on all the plants that are in there learning about what the campus is like oh well there's kind of a guide that could answer questions for you and and you know you should see on your screen an image of Christine which is one of our Sumerian hosts I'll dive a little bit more into that later but you can ask them questions and they can provide you information about about the space itself whereas AR it's not so much about experiencing a place that's out of reach as much as an experience for a place that you can reach more deeply so if you're in Seattle you could get context based information as you tour the spheres in person and so with these experiences in AR application can serve rich contextual content as part of your experience and so this is something that we see medical or medical device companies doing in healthcare we see variations of field service where people might be going out and getting more information or context about machinery that they're working on so there are a lot of different use cases for this that fall outside of gaming and one of the interesting things is that AR is not just for contextual overlays it's something that people are starting to use to augment their productivity and visualize data in new ways and to work with their peers and collaborate on that shared data visualization so it's a really interesting way of starting to look at the look at the world and and add some context around things finally with these types of immersive experiences you know we're seeing that there are all types of jobs of different sizes and they're dangerous some of them are impossible in real life and we're seeing a lot of use for VR to simulate these types of experiences and so for instance an easy one is exploring space you know you can't get to Mars today hopefully we're going to be there soon but today it's a little bit difficult so customers in these situations whether are they're looking at critical infrastructure or large machinery where it's difficult to train someone or give them the experience on exactly how to handle a particular situation VR becomes really applicable in those edge cases so what you know ultimately what's the need you know what is this design for and it's really designed for people and by what I mean Sumerian but it's it's designed for customers who have limited resources and by limited resources I mean it's either time or accessibility to skilled developers who are familiar with 3d you they might have somebody that is learning 3d or has you know particular interest in it and has has started to experiment with it a little bit but it's not their core skill set but what we have found that there are a lot of people who have web and mobile dev development skills and they're looking for tools that can provide them an easy way to build content and it's easy to share across platforms and further they want to connect to existing AWS services to add information that they've already created for their businesses into their immersive applications and an example of that might be if I was interested in visualizing Internet of Things data I would be able to look at a 3d representation of a piece of equipment but I might be able to capture sensor information in real time and then stream that information into my a our VR scene and have that context added to that experience so we've talked about WebEx R we've talked a little bit about what are the types of use cases and we're seeing people build on this so what's the ultimate goal here and what we're looking at doing on the Cimmerian team is how do we bring a z-axis to the Internet we want to enable designers and developers to use nothing more than a web browser to be able to create these experiences we want it to be easy to use with the the programming languages that they're already familiar with we really want to enable a build once model and deploy across all platforms so you don't have to take into account specifics for every platform and finally we want to be able to add the power of connecting to the cloud and using the additional services that are there so that's the promise of Amazon Sumerian and for those of you that are on the on the live stream that are wondering about the name the reference is to Snow Crash which is a book by Neil Stevenson Sumerian is the language that the characters coded in to to code the BIOS to of the brainstem to essentially get into VR in this sort of dystopian future so the name is actually deeply rooted in these particular ideas of different realities so let's take a quick look at Sumerian and then I will let Jake do the the full the full run-through but as a quick overview Sumerian is a full in browser integrated development environment or IDE for creating AR VR and 3d applications there are pre-built templates for common scenes and functionality that are included with Sumerian so you can get started easily an example of that would be that there is a universal AR template so you can build an AR scene for both iOS and Android so that's using AR kit or AR core and then deploy once and be able to view that scene on AR compatible device and mobile devices the interface is a little - no code visual scripting interface so there's a visual state machine where you can add behaviors to objects that you place within your scene and script visually and in addition to that for those who want to get into more complex scripting there's a text editor where you can interact directly with your scene by using JavaScript then there's also direct integration to AWS services through the IDE or through the AWS SDK and so you can use JavaScript to call api's of other services and be able to bring that bring that information that you're looking for into your scene and then finally and what I think is the absolute coolest thing about Cimmerian is one-click publishing so you can go in you can do a single click and you can then have your scene deploy to our URL and you can share that URL with anybody and if you're using a compatible browser so that's Chrome or Firefox today the current version or one version back so current or minus one you can run that experience and you can plug in an hmd and experience what Cimmerian looks like another interesting thing that we're doing is that we have realized that part of creating these experiences is that there really is a content problem and an sourcing content and there are lots of places to get 3d models but being that we are Amazon we have we have access to a host of of models from our furniture teams and we've made these available to Sumerian customers for free so they can go into the asset library in Sumerian and Jake will talk about this some more but then you can use these assets and you can start building scenes with these assets and it doesn't cost you anything so we talked a little bit about what Sumerian is we talked about some of the technologies involved in making it possible but one of the key pieces is integration with the AWS services and this is how we make a lot of this work and I like to talk about it in two is one there's what I call direct integration and two there's what I call indirect integration I'll start with indirect integration what that means is that you can add the AWS SDK to your Cimmerian scene and you can access AWS services through that with the text editor and the api's so there are plenty of services that you can call data from and pull into your scene now direct integration those are services that we've taken a step deeper into Sumerian and incorporated them into the Cimmerian interface and Jake will talk about this specifically but on the right hand side of the IDE there is a set of panels which we call component panels which I'll allow you to more deeply interact with the properties of a particular object that's in the scene and some of the services from AWS we've integrated directly into those component panels and that allows us to do some really interesting stuff and we'll start with integrating hosts into your VR AR or immersive scene that you're serving through a browser so Cimmerian comes with a couple of hosts and on your screen you can see that there's Christine and which what Christine can do is she can essentially act as a guide through your scene and you can interact with this character and the character can provide you information about what you're seeing now we do this because we believe that voice is a natural way to interact with in these types of immersive experiences now what's interesting is when you're in VR I'll use that as an example your hands are often occupied by controllers and you have a limited number of inputs on those controllers and they do very specific things but there might be more interactions within a VR experience that you want to add and so using voice you can start to be able to ask questions and interact with characters and they can provide information or context about what you're actually seeing in the scene and we use three voice AI services from AWS to do this oh I should say to voice AIS and one for facial recognition but Amazon Lex is a service that allows you to convert natural speech so what I'm saying right now to a text string so that you can do some sort of analysis on that string and get information back from it and then Paulie is a service that converts those text strings that you get back into sound into into a voice and you can pick a voice to go along with the Cimmerian hosts and you know they can be male or female and and they'll be able to provide a response to you and then finally there's also the ability to add a service called Amazon recognition which is a image recognition service that will be able to identify certain aspects of a video stream or a still image that's in front of it and so it can do things like recognize people if they're in a database and it can provide information around those people so for instance if I was to walk up to a smart digital sign and I was and my image was in the database it would be able to recognize me as a as a particular person that it should greet so the Cimmerian hosts are really driven to be believable and you have to be able to engage with them in a natural conversation and in order to do this they can expose a wide range of emotions gestures and animations and we do this as in the previous slide I was talking about Amazon Pali by using a markup language called SS ml or speech markup language and what we can do with that is we can tie particular words within a script to gestures so that the host becomes more believable you can't really see my hands right now but as I'm talking to you I'm moving my hands around and speaking and interacting and having a dialogue with someone is a lot more than just your voice and opening your mouth it has a lot to do with the expressions on your face and how you move your body and so being able to drive those dynamically through the scripts is something that starts to make the Sumerian host incredibly believable the other way we do this is through tracking and so the hosts can have a point of interest that's defined and that point of interest allows them to essentially follow you with their eyes in there and their bodies so that if the camera in in the scene is moving a little bit and Jake will talk a little bit more about camera rigs but you'll be able to see how the host follows and then finally there are gross body emotions that we can we can animate into a particular scene so if you want to show joy or happiness or you want to show sadness the hosts can show that too so this is just one use case of how you can integrate AWS services into a scene and start to drive a more dynamic experience in these types of applications so in this example here you can see that the host is is following the camera rig around the scene and this is Christine currently there are three hosts that come with Sumerian there's Christine Preston and Luke and they can't they're free you can add them to your scene and you can start to interact with them almost immediately and you can see in this particular example how Christine is following the camera rig in the scene and you can see how she leads with her eyes and then she turns with her head and it starts to become a much more believable experience so one of the interesting use cases that we discovered with hosts was smart digital signage and you know there were developers that started deploying these rich interactive content that was on a 2d screen so not not ARR VR at all but 3d served through a browse on a 2d screen and they're using these essentially as digital concierge you know whether it's at a bank or in a stadium for an event or whether it's in in travel or hospitality if you're you know on a cruise ship maybe or you're in a hotel or something like that you know media is looking to use these types of things for how can we display content to our consumers in a way that makes it more engaging and differentiates what we're trying to show so it's a really interesting use case for this one particular integration of AWS services into these immersive experiences so that's pretty much what I wanted to cover in the overview of Sumerian but before I did that I really wanted to give everyone on the stream a understanding of the resources and the communities that are available to them if they want to get started with Sumerian so Sumerian is open for use with an AWS account today you can go to aws.amazon.com you can get in you can start to play with with the tool and you can start to build your scenes almost immediately there are lots of assets that are available there for you jake has done an amazing job of creating tutorials and content that really help you getting started ranging from starting to understand how the interface actually works to you know more complex tutorials about scripting and using the scripting API within Sumerian so those links at the top of the page right there those will get you started with with that information if you're in Seattle we would love to see you at some of the Sumerian meetup so you can look us up on Meetup and you know we would be happy to host you there and talk and more depth in person there is an amazing developer community that's starting to build on slack sumerian comm if you're interested in getting started with arv our 3d applications I would suggest that this is your first stop there are lots of people there that have been working with the tool since it was released at reinvent which is AWS his big technical conference that we hold in the end of November and you know they they are great resources in addition to that a lot of the Sumerian engineers are actually monitoring that slack Channel and they'll jump in and answer questions on a regular basis so it's a good way to start to get to know members of the Sumerian team will be on twitch regularly like we said at the beginning of this program we are going to be holding a weekly show on Tuesday afternoons and you know look at the aws.amazon.com / twitch page for more information about the episodes that are upcoming and then there are also some reddit channels that you can go to and get more information about Sumerian so really appreciate the time I was super excited to be here and give the first overview of Sumerian again my name is Ben Moore I'm the lead product manager for Amazon Sumerian you can get me on Twitter with with my username at jamon Moo and I'll be happy to answer any questions and if anyone on the stream is in London we'll be at the AWS summit next week there and be happy to meet with you in person so with that Jake I'll give it back to you great thanks Ben that was great we do have a good question anagram is asking what's the difference between the two subreddits some some of the subreddits are actually created by Sumerian users and so there are just content that they're they're putting up the reddit's that are up there are not actually AWS managed reddit's so if you have questions about those I would I would direct you to to talk to the owner of those groups gotcha cool all right I love all the chat that's going on here in the chat room Ben I know we'll catch up here very shortly as he can switch over his screens and kind of catch up onto some of the conversations it's obvious that people are really really interested in the home and that's actually no surprise because we get that a lot people especially when we're presenting and we start talking about the host people get really really jazzed about it and so um yeah there's there's a lot of things you can do there's a lot of thought you can do a speech using Amazon blacks Amazon Pali and we're not gonna get into some of those things quite yet in this broadcast but we are planning on doing that in the future so we we hope that you stay tuned and for future broadcasts because there's a lot of great content there's also a great content on our tutorials page too so if you visit that page I'm a lot of what you can do with hosts is already there but we will be walking through it as well yeah so without without anything else I guess if there's any other questions I can pause to answer no I'm gonna switch over to my screen and I'm gonna start showing you guys some give you a quick walkthrough of the Amazon Sumerian interface all right I'm gonna start at the AWS console most of you are probably somewhat familiar if you're not if you log into AWS create an account log in you can find Amazon Sumerian right here under the AR V our category and so you click that I already have it open so I'm just going to switch tabs and that will take you to the dashboard the dashboard is kind of the starting place the jumping board for Sumerian it has it catalogues all of your scenes that you have built these are scenes that I've worked on for various demonstrations and demos and other tutorials and then below that is a section for templates so these are pre-made created templates that you can use and you can access that has lots of different stuff a lot of people are really interested in the augmented reality template so if you open that up you can get going building AR applications a lot quicker than building them from scratch so that's a great place to start it also contains the two most common ones I should say really the most common one is this default lighting one here at the bottom that is one that uses some professionally made and organized and lighting that that shows all of your stuff in your scene in a really well lit fashion and so you don't get any kind of weird looks on the hosts or other models you might have it's just it's really well lit it's especially lit and so we will be looking at that template here soon but I'm gonna first jump into an empty scene because I want to show something about lighting and how lighting kind of effects your scene all right so to get started I am going to click on the empty scene and just to note if you click up here create a new scene it will also take you to an empty scene and so I'm gonna call it Twitch empty and this will will start loading a new scene for us and voila here we are this is Amazon Sumerian take a moment to recognize how cool this is we are in a web browser we are editing live we are editing and updating live within the web and within the web browser I'm currently using Chrome it's it's really really amazing what you can do here we're really excited so every time I log in I'm like whoa this is amazing so as you notice this is just a gray background and there's really not much here that's because it's an empty scene there's no lights and so if you import any assets you really won't be able to see it very well because there are no lights the only thing that really comes equipped in this empty scene is a default camera and the default camera is what you are viewing the scene from on the canvas here in the center and so that's really the only thing that comes equipped with it does have this grid but this grid is not an entity it's just a reference point that you can turn on and off and it does not appear in a published scene so again it's just a reference point because if you turn it off then it just looks like a blank gray screen and it doesn't really look like a 3d world which it is so we'll keep that on what I'm gonna be doing is kind of working my way down and just describing all the different parts and components within the UI and again if you have any questions Ben is now going to be handling the chat room I'll be glancing over from time to time when I can catch a breath and look but yeah please ask any questions that you need to address and I would love to do that for you alright starting up here in the top top left this AWS logo click that that'll take you back to the dashboard we don't need to do that so we'll keep moving this scene drop down menu this allows you to do a lot of basic stuff from like a file drop-down view file drop-down menu it allows you to create start a new scene or open an existing one save and also publish and we will so we will come back to this menu in a minute the tools drop down menu this allows you to quickly toggle over to things like the text editor the text editor is where you will edit all your speech files all your HTML and your scripts we will not be looking at that in-depth or really at all today I don't think probably not the state machine also is a really really important part of Amazon Sumerian we won't get to it today but we definitely will be using this a lot in future broadcasts and other demonstrations this is where you actually create behaviors and interactivity between your assets and your entities and so you can actually make things move instead of having just a stagnant 3d model and then lastly the timeline timeline helps you kind of create an animated create animations and other things so these are just a quick shorthand way to get to them and also they have hotkey shortcuts to get to those alright moving over top center of the canvas the canvas by the way is the center viewport it's really what is where you view your scene and what's going on inside of it create entity if you click this this opens up a small library of basic entities and objects so for with shapes so you got a box and a cylinder a sphere and also 2d shapes and below that we have the others category which contains the empty entity an empty entity can act just as a empty folder to contain other entities also HTML 3d particles and timeline and then below that are two quite important categories lights and cameras we're going to be looking at lights fairly in-depth lis today a little bit and then cameras we're going to touch a bit on the orbit camera and so that is well kind of a ttle reach kind of the depth of what we're going to cover in this tutorial or in this broadcast for right now since I have it open I'm just going to select this box and add it to my scene and you'll notice immediately a box is populated in very middle of my scene it looks dark dark gray almost black and then also you notice that this pops up over here this is the inspector panel there's going to be unique components for whatever entity you have selected it's going to be have unique properties and components over here on the right but we will cover that in depth in just a bit so next to the create entity menu is the import assets button this will open up the asset library that been mentioned so if you want to find hosts if you want to import hosts into your scene this is where you would go if you want to find any of the the furniture that he was referencing or the other content so all those things that you were looking at in bins presentation a lot of them you can find here this is a growing library and so there's just there's lots of stuff that you can find here and use it's all publicly available and since we're here I'm just going to actually no I'm gonna skip that right now we'll wait we will be looking at some hosts a little bit later but I'll import them actually in my next scene that'll create so I'll just hit cancel for now so that's the import assets moving over the help button allows you to quickly get to our tutorials user guide scripting API and our slack channel as well and then if you want to logout there's your your account number or just sorry your account drop-down where you can log out so that covers the basics of the top bar now let's look at some of the panels that are involved in the in the Cimmerian UI over here on the left is the entities panel the entities panel is going to hold everything that is within your scene so right now we only have two things we have a box and we have default camera we're looking through the camera at the box it also has this twitch empty entity this is an important one this isn't really a separate entity necessarily it is I guess technically but really what it is it's in your entire scene and so if you remember I called our scene twitch empty so that's what the name of this top-level entity or our scene level entity and also when you select this notice that there are some very unique components that are only available on this top-level entity so things like environment post effects scene stats your AWS configuration when you start integrating with other AWS services and so that's where you would kind of configure all of your top level or scene level global settings so below that of course everything is will be contained within your senior box and your camera and let's see let's what's what are we gonna do next alright I'm gonna have my box selected right now and this will show you some arrows with on my box these are called gizmos transform gizmos that allow you to move your object around within your scene but I want to describe the inspector panel and so I'm gonna have this selected and I'm gonna unfold the top or expand the top tab this is really your descriptions tab so if you open this you can take a screenshot of this entity if it's a special entity you can rename it so I'm just gonna rename it big box I can give it a description if I want and tags custom attributes so a lot all the metadata about that entity you can edit and customize there below that is a component that every entity within your scene will have which is the transform component the transform component is the component that tells the entity where it is within your space and how its organizing configured so is it rotated is it large is it small so the scale rotation and translation translation is really another word for a position or location so those three words are essentially synonymous and I often times right or wrong I do use them synonymously so we have the x y&z coordinates for translation and so let's just play around with this real quick if I change this to one it moves the box over if I change the Y to one it'll move it up and if I change the Z it'll move it over to the left another thing I can do is I can click within these value boxes and rotate it or click and hold and move my mouse and it'll rotate the Box any direction I want and also with the scale a lot of a lot of objects become automatically selected with the uniform scale selected if you do that and you change the size of a box it will do it all dimensions are all directions at the same size if you don't want to do that so if you want to make one size a little bit smaller then we don't have a cube so much anymore as a different different shaped box so that's a transform component it's used a lot we're going to use it a little bit more here in this demonstration and we will come back to another way to manipulate or change these values in a moment I'm one big thing to remember is that whatever entity you have selected over here in the in the entities panel it will change the the components that are over here in what we call the inspector panel so if I have the default camera selected we have a camera component and a script component on that entity if I have my big box selected I have geometry and material geometry is the shape of the of the box material covers the the look of the box and so are there any textures applied to it how does it reflect light what's the color of it so there's there's a lot of different options if I unfold the materials component you'll notice that there are a bunch of options here the only thing that I want to change right now is the color so I'm gonna click this color selector color picker which is right now a light light gray and I'm gonna select a red okay great now notice my box didn't really change much I can notice there's a little bit of a red hue to it but not much we'll get to why that is in a minute and how to change that but essentially to answer that question there are no lights in our scene so we actually can't really see it but we'll come back to that in just a moment so that's the inspector panel the inspector panel is the largest place to the where you spent a lot of your time so how do you make adjustments and change properties and add components and adjust those components so where a lot of your editing actually comes into play is the inspector panel but remember it does change based on the entity you have selected ok below the entities panel is the assets panel the assets panel is the large library for your scene so anything that you have added to your scene it'll appear here in your assets panel if something it gets deleted from your entities panel it'll still appear here in your assets panel most of the time assets come in order week what we call packs and so one asset will actually contain a lot of different bye that makeup that one large asset so for example Christine or Preston or Luke all our hosts it we have one pack but there are several different files that actually comprise that that whole host same thing with a lot of other entities there are textures there are colors there are shaders there's there's a lot that goes into each 3d object and so you will find all of that here and and it's a the assets panel is a really really a great place to get used to because if you get comfortable using this it'll really help your workflow move a lot faster then if you're recreating things or recreating behaviors from scratch so if you can reuse a lot of textures and objects and assets the assets panel becomes really really handy in that sense okay that covers the majority of it oh also above the entities panel you have the undo redo you can duplicate things so I can duplicate this box so I currently have two boxes now I have two moving around I want if I want to undo that I can get rid of it and also we can trash so if you want to get rid of a get rid of an entity you can do that up there as well all right the last thing we'll cover in this the quick UI overview is the canvas itself so the canvas again is where you are viewing your object where you're viewing your scene to move around in your scene you have a camera of course and that camera is moving around within your scene so the first thing to learn is how to control that camera well the default camera that we have is actually an orbit cam if you remember I mentioned that the orbit cam is what we're going to talk about real briefly and what it is and how it works is it orbits around like a center point so right now I was focused on the box and as I hold my right mouse button down and I scrub left and right then I'm orbiting around roughly around that object I moved it a little bit so it's not quite in the center anymore so to orbit so to kind of float around like this I'm holding my right mouse button and moving left and right up and down I can also pan my mount or pan my scene or my camera by holding the shift button and then my left mouse button and I can pan left and right up and down so those are the two basic controls for the orbit cam orbiting and panning up and down and also my zoom is just using my scroll wheel zooming out zooming in sometimes your scenes can get really really big and so if I want if I'm zoomed way way out and I want to focus in on this box instead of finding it within my scene and then zooming in if I just have it selected and I hit the F key it frames it that's why I remember F it frames it right in the middle of my canvas so it's a lot quicker way to find visually find objects within your scene okay so that's the canvas we have a few different options above the canvas there's these three buttons we're not going to get into this forth this global space toggle button we're not going to get into that right now but at these three if you remember if I open my transform component we have translation which is position rotation and scale these three buttons relate to those three properties and so if I have the translation selected I can then just grab these arrows and move them back and forth wherever I want and you'll notice as I do that the properties in the translation boxes are changing if I select the rotation button I then get rings on my entity and then I can just drag up and down my entity to rotate it however I want and again these about these properties change over here in the transform component lastly I have the scale button if I click that then I get these handles where I can increase this way or that way along the X Y or Z coordinates or the vertices I'm sorry so that's a quick way more visual way to change your objects a lot of people ask which is a better method to use I'm using the handles or using these values it really depends on what you're doing and how precise you need to be sometimes you want to do it visually sometimes you need to be really exact so it just depends on what you're trying to do lastly well not lastly moving over is the shading View button so the shading View menu so if I click on this button I get a menu of different shading options so if I just click for wireframes then I'm viewing my box with just the wireframes so that's what it looks like I just want to look at it full shading so I go back moving on if I have a skybox I don't currently have a skybox I will get into what a skybox is just a minute but if I have one I can turn it on or off here just like before I can turn on and off the grid and if I have any post effects post effects are like blurs or glows added to my scene globally I can turn those on and off I don't have any so that it won't do anything and then also over here the camera menu I can switch to different cameras if I have them within my scene and right now I don't want to do say I can't do a 2d camera actually that just gives me a 2d view the editor camera and the default camera are pretty much the same oops I guess I had that I had that turned off so I'll just go back to the editor camera let's see so that is the camera drop down menu and then last we have the frame selection this does the same thing as pressing the F key to frame an object within or if you want to frame your entire scene if you click shift + F they'll frame your entire scene right now we only have a box in our scene so won't look much different and then I have the fullscreen button over here if I click that I can go into full screen to play my scene if I have any behaviors or any thing playing within my scene I can press the play button and will go into play mode if I do that I can't select the the objects in anymore and then my camera still operates very similarly except that right now at least the way I have it set up and this for this camera is that my my right mouse button will pan and my left mouse button orbits so it's almost almost switched inversed for those actions but that is customizable for cameras that you build yourself alright I'll go ahead and click stop the the last thing I want to do in this scene is I want to show you a little bit about lights I'll try to breeze through this as quickly as I can but there are three light types I clicked the create entity up here on the top and there are three types point directional and spot I'm going to start with a point and I'm gonna select my transform handles and it appears right in the middle of the scene and I can move that this way and as I move it and as I actually emit light onto my box now I can see that it is red couldn't see that before and if I move it around the box reacts to the lighting as it would in the real world now point lights axe point likes point lights act like lightbulbs and so they emit light in all directions around them spherically and the location of them is very important so the closer it gets so if I change the transform the closer it gets to an object the brighter it will become or the more well lit it will become basically I'm trying to say is that translation matters for a point light and so where it is in the scene makes a difference the rotation doesn't really matter because it just emits in a sphere but the translation does matter and the reason I'm pointing that out is because other lights are not necessarily the same so that's a point light I'm gonna rename this just so I can keep it straight so I have the light to select it I click this top tab over here in the inspector panel the description panel and I'm just gonna call it point light great now we can keep it straight because I'm added two more lights so now we'll create entity again we'll select directional and directional lights are meant to act mostly like the Sun and so they emit light from infinitely far away and so that's important to note because their translation doesn't make a difference so as you notice as I'm moving it around the lighting on the box doesn't change and so if I have the light on this side of the box you'll notice that the lighting doesn't change if I move it on this side it doesn't change that's because the light is still coming from I guess I'm backwards here on my camera it's coming from this direction on to the box however if I switch to rotation and start moving this around you'll notice that it does so if you wanted to manipulate is it as this light supposed or the Sun supposed to be in the middle of the day is it supposed to be at night or dusk or dawn that's where rotation comes into play and so yeah that's the best way to describe it alight is it acts like sunlight and so wrote translation does not matter rotation does matter point lights are the exact opposite of that however I like I do like to move my directional lights just out of the way because I just don't like having this extra a little bulb down here one thing I'll note is that when you press play those do disappear so light is being emitted from right here roughly and also infinitely far away for the directional light but those are only there when you're editing just so you can get a point of reference for where they're at all right I'm gonna rename this light directional and then the last light we have is a spot light spot lights are pretty cool they act just like you would expect they are spot lights days today their best they reflect spotlights flashlights headlights and I'm gonna go ahead and hide my point light in my directional light so we can get a better idea of how this works so as I move it around there you go starts acting much more like a spotlight I want to move it up and angle it down and it can kind of come from up above that box note that the translation and the rotation both matter for the spotlight and again for all three of these lights and I'll just call this spot light whatever light you have selected there are different properties over here in the inspector panel and so directional lights for example that you can turn shadows on with directional lights point lights you cannot have shadows turned on and spot lights you also can turn shadows on so that's just some important thing to know and also notice that there's all these different settings here you can make the light brighter you can change the color of the light all things I don't need to do right now but it was as you're experimenting around it's really fun to experiment around with lights and how they work because it's pretty amazing what they can do all right that covers it for the basic you I'd I would like to now jump out of this scene and then create a new scene using the default lighting template that we have and I mentioned to create kind of a quick scene using a host using and some other objects and using some primitive entities as well so let's go ahead and do that I'll click the AWS logo up here this will help us to leave the scene take us back to the dashboard and you'll notice that my twitch empty the one I was just working on is there I'm gonna scroll down to the bottom and look for this default lighting template and we'll call this one twitch lighting and as this populates the this will have a few more things in it like the the empty scene did not it does have a camera it also has I'm looking over here the entities panel if I expand this we have three different lights and they're all directional and you can see them all right here oops if I select them then you can see where they're at so it does have three directional lights that are intended to light all scenes very very well and professionally and so they look really nice you don't have to worry about lighting if you're if that's not something you're concerned about its if it's not something you need to customize this is a great this is a great template to use notice also that the background is different this is what this has what we call a sky sphere and sky sphere is basically a large spherical 3d background or a 360-degree background of your scene and so it is meant to look like a blue sky so it is lighter here at the horizon and then creates two darker blue in both directions up and down so looking like a blue sky and you can customize the you can add in your own sky spheres your own sky boxes also a skybox acts like a infinitely large box around your scene so it actually has six sides to the box so that is something that you can find if I clicked which my my top level or my scene level entity here and I click environment under skybox that's where I can make those edits and changes right there alright so let's go back to my scene alright I don't need to worry about lights let's start creating a simple scene I want to build a quick room that has two walls and Flor and I want to add in a few objects from the asset library so a good place to start is just like we did before with a box so I click create entity did that probably Oh too fast create entity and then add box again that adds a box into the middle of our scene I'll move over here angle my camera nice look I don't want it this light gray color so I'm gonna go under material in the inspector panel select the color and let's do it's too kind of this dark bluish looking color alright now I want to create a floor so I want it to be fairly a lot larger and a little bit flat or much more flat so I'm gonna select the scale I'm gonna make the box more flat by bringing down the Y value and then I'm gonna expand the Z and then the X however I do want these to be accurate and so I will make the Z or the X seven units and the Z also seven units and one thing that's important to remember is that roughly these units if you are in VR they roughly measure out one meter and so they're supposed to be approximately a meter in real-world space ok great so now I have my floor I will now want to add two walls instead of starting over I'm just gonna create click or duplicate this box and just flip it up so I'm gonna duplicate it now you do see a box too right here and it doesn't look any different that's because it's still sitting inside my other box so if I move it out now you can see it I'm gonna rotate it vertically this way and so again I want to get it I got it almost to 90 degrees and now I can go over here and make it 90 and then I'll click back to my transform handles and move that pretty close okay great and let's rename this so I have box which I which was my floor so I'll call it floor box - I will call left nope left wall okay great now I want to create a right wall so I'm just gonna go and duplicate my guess I'll move that so it's a little closer there we go I'm gonna duplicate my left wall but instead of a left wall - I will call it right wall again it's they're both sitting inside the same space and so I do need to move it out so now I have my wall and let's rotate it around the z-axis and we want it to be about zero it looks like I'm just gonna bring this to move my camera around oh that's not right there we go so I have to be 90 90 and zero so now they're all really close I don't need these all to be credible us perfectly they can kind of intersect one another a little bit okay so now I have a room that I built out of basic primitive objects a primitive box now let's add a few things from the asset library so I click import assets above the canvas and the first thing I want to add is a TV I want to put a TV on the wall there is a TV within the asset library and it's right down here so I select television hanging click Add one thing to note is when you are adding things from the asset library they don't automatically populate in your scene they are they populate down here in the assets library or the asset panel and to find the entity that will be added to your scene you got to look for this hexagon icon so if I find that and drag it over to my scene then it'll actually populated in my scene also the the asset as subpanel is a very large it becomes a very large library of files and so if you want to filter down to just your assets or your entities I'm sorry click the ant ''tis filter button and then that's the only thing you'll see are entities within your asset panel you can do that with all different types of assets so meshes skeletons materials sounds scripts speeches JSON files skyboxes behaviors which are created in the state machine and textures which are oftentimes images alright so let's go back to this television we're just want to put it on the wall somewhere it's backwards and so going to flip it around this way and then I want to make that 180 degrees go back to my translation component my translation gizmo handle and I'll place it right about there looks good now I want to add a stool so I'm gonna go to the import assets button again to go to the asset library interfaces scroll down there's a stool a chrome stool the same thing I have my entities filter selected here so I'm only gonna see the entities populate in my assets panel so I'm just gonna keep it like that to make it a little bit easier there's my stool oh I have the floor selected you need the stool select it I'm gonna move it over here move it up just a bit and let's rotate it that way good well the import assets again I'm just gonna add one more thing before I add a host this table so click the table click Add same thing it over he appears over here in the assets panel I'll drag the entity the hexagon icon over into the scene I want to put this next to the stool and I actually want to add one other thing before the host I want to put a rug down on the floor so we have a rug this rug is often used if you've seen the TV room tutorial or the view room tutorial this is the same rug that we have we're gonna click Add alright add that to my scene zoom out here a little bit yeah okay it appears underneath the floor so I just got to drag it up I'm gonna give myself a bird's-eye view of my scene okay so now I have a nice little scene that I can place a host within with a nice a simple but real we're real world looking background with real 3d objects alright let's go to import assets again we're gonna grab Christine and actually know we oughta do Luke because Luke just we just released Luke and so show him to the world okay he will also appear the same thing applies to hosts is that you want to grab the entity itself and add it to the scene however just remember that hosts are very heavy and large entities and objects and so they can take just a minute to load because there's just a lot going on to get into your scene but it is working you should appear here in just a second right we zoom out notice remember with the orbit cam the more I move out and the more I orbit around I make larger movements the more I move out from whatever objects or whatever the center point was right now the center point is of the rug so we'll go back and I'll click the F key to zoom back in and then I have Luke over here so I'm gonna go ahead and add the entity to the scene and he should appear almost right on top of the rug you might have his feet down a little bit inside the rug oh look at that my TV is not even close to the wall so I'm gonna fix that looks like it is okay there we go trying to do too many things at once so I have my TV selected I'm just gonna move that back against the wall and then select Luke and bring him up and then I'll rotate him around the y-axis to face me a little too far there oh now it's overcompensating I need to slow down okay great so now I have a hosts several objects and a primitive entity that I've duplicated a couple times if I press play not much is gonna happen in this scene other than Luke who is currently who was animated will show a small slight animation that we call an idle a minute animation so it'll appear that he's breathing it appeared that he's moving here that he's a real-life character instead of just standing there and that kind of almost T pose as I move in and zoom in you notice that he's blinking his shoulders are moving he's breathing this is an idle animation but as I move my camera around notice he's not following me and so we're not gonna go too deep into hosts in this broadcast but I do want to show one quick thing about them so I have a Luke selected I'll collapse my transform component and I'll open the host component and notice this point of interests no there's no point of interest selected I'm going to go ahead and select look at entity so if you want them to look at a specific entity go select that look at entity option and then in this drop-down or this drop input drop an entity in there that you wanted to look at so for example if I want them to look at the rug I'll drop the rug there nothing will change actually right away I need to stop the scene and then replay it and once it's updated and loading there we go now he's looking down he's his attention is on that entity the rug great now let's do one of the thing in the thing that's probably most common and most fascinating cool about this I'm gonna delete that rug entity and I'm gonna add the default camera entity there the default camera remember is the camera that we are looking at our scene through so if we press play as Ben was showing earlier this is exactly what he was doing is that now that he's look his attention is focused on the camera his eyes will follow wherever the camera moves of course he we don't have the Exorcist type thing going on so he can't go all the way around but he does his best to follow if you zoom in a little bit this is this is actually really really fascinating if you notice as I move just slightly his eyes are moving his head is not so that's how well these these characters are rigged is that not only are not just their head moves but all these different parts and components of the hosts move independently and then congruently with one another so then the more I moved then his head does move along with me it's really really fascinating how well-built and incredible these these hosts are and so here is again it's just an example of a quick scene that I've built if I want to publish the scene I can go to the scene drop-down menu I can click publish and then if I click publish I can view the scene and then it will jump me into a new tab and this is unique unique URL that is was created and I've called at which lighting you can adjust that name however you want but that's what I have right now and as it loads we will get essentially the same thing in the URL and in our web browser there we are notice the grid is gone but there it is I'm gonna share this scene in the chat room because check it out if you want there it is alright that that covers the basics of the UI for Cimmerian also if I want to unpublish it I can do that but I won't because I want you to look at it that covers the basics of the UI we can look a little bit at the host we will be doing a lot deeper dives into Sumerian hosts and the state machine so we can make some interactions happen if you click on this something else happens lots of really cool stuff that's available to happen Ben has been moderating the slack sorry not the Select channel he's been monitoring the chat is anything going on over here I should see my question think we're pretty much caught up there Jake great I can hang for just a second if anybody wants to ask any more questions I will note if you do we did mention this earlier where is I'll go back to this if you are interested and you want to join the slack Channel please do the slack our slack community is growing there's a lot going on there we're interacting with people our engineers our creative artists it's an active community and so please join that and as let us know how we can help how we can assist and make your lives easier and understanding how this works and we love also hearing ideas and seeing customers interact with one another and share solutions and yeah just community growing around Sumerian so there's nothing else I guess we'll call this this broadcast good then sounds good to me Jake thanks for joining thanks everyone well talk to you next week

Channel: Amazon Web Services

Views: 31,972

Rating: 4.9455781 out of 5

Keywords: AWS, Amazon Web Services, Cloud, cloud computing, AWS Cloud, Amazon Sumerian, Augmented realiity, virtual reality, VR, mixed reality, immersive experiences

Id: KaW9D_rHhIc

Length: 70min 39sec (4239 seconds)

Published: Thu May 03 2018