Developing AR/VR Experiences with Amazon Sumerian | Ep 6: Foundations - Customizing Your Environment

[Music] hello everyone my name is Jake's mr. the creative content specialist for Amazon Sumerian and you are joining us for I believe our sixth episode of using Amazon Sumerian I'm losing track now do you know what it has been we have been a lot I think I think we're on number six runs I think we're on six it could be five anyway thanks for having me back though yeah Ben's back Ben's on camera now and yeah we're excited to be here we are gonna be looking at something special today let's see let me pull up the topic in our agenda there it is okay we are going to be looking at the customizing environment which includes the background sky boxes sky spheres and lighting so these are these are components and settings for your scene that sort of surround the what you're typically are kind of working on so so far we have been working on like either a host or a small room or something a little bit more closed like we're getting an echo online are we getting enough yeah we just we just got a notification that we're getting an echo well hey everyone we will we'll check out the echo if you just give us a second wool we'll work on fixing that okay well audio sounds great now we're getting a now we're getting its a good okay we're gonna keep going if anyone else hears some audio issues please just let us know you need to add some walls it'll cut down the sound we do yeah that's a good point yeah not because we're floating out here in space as you can tell it surprisingly I know it looks like we are in inside the Cimmerian editor you know with like a skybox background we are actually in a room with green screen on the walls I know that's shocking it's probably kind of disappointing too but that's where we're at and surprisingly that's what we're gonna be talking about so what you see behind me and also been the this is a sky sphere and this kind of represents the background of a scene and so that's we're gonna be jumping into like I was saying we have been working on primarily scenes that are a little isolated right so you're looking at a host you're looking at a room of some kind and but what goes on around that that scene that you're building like what happens in the background what happens with some of the lighting that is involved and can you change and can you alter that their answer is yes you can and that's we're gonna be looking at today let me just jump over the chatroom again let's see we do we have some people back oh we're getting lots of people here this is great thank you everybody for joining us let's see I'm I'm really bad at actually like naming off the names so in why I don't even know if I see kid 80 oh thank you I'm glad Ben's here let's see STI games yeah you've been back I'm just good to see you here howdy Corden yeah lots of great people thank you for joining us if I miss you I apologize so yeah customizing the environment that's we're gonna be doing today also a couple of announcements is that we we've recently released some new tutorials for customizing clothing so you can actually customize some of the host clothing so there's a tutorial out there then I'll send some links out on the on the chat here and you guys can go in and look at those and you can see some about how to actually change clothing you can do that programmatically now add logos change color and then there are also some some different outfits as well so definitely check it out it's worth seeing on the host yeah and we also we've updated some tutorials regarding getting started in VR and we've added some support for different devices there as well so there are tutorials we'll make sure we post all those here in the chat room and of course you can always find us all that information on slack let me throw up the slack real quick nope that didn't work I'll handle it Jake wait go ahead get started in this there we go slack that's the marionette world boom okay so let's get started with today's topic and agenda and that is looking at the environment all right I'm gonna jump over to my screen I have a scene here and this is something we have built using the past that one of our art and gave to me and what it is is a beach with some water I'm gonna go and play it you can't see it real well because there's no lighting we will deal with that that's part of the what we're gonna be looking at I'll go and play and you can see kind of what this scene is the water is actually really really cool so check this out alright so I play you can see this water it's kind of floating and we do have sand and so I'll turn off the grid so you don't see that yeah there's some really cool assets in here the water is pretty awesome it looks like there is a light shining on the water and first I was confused what that is what it turns out to be is actually it's the water itself it's it's the water entity that we have its called this water script that I haven't included in here but it does not actually mean that there is light in the scene that is just the water itself so anyway we'll kind of deal with that and we'll show you how to manipulate that so it customized earth so it lines up with the lighting we're gonna add to our scene so let's start with the environment twitch right so this is the entity this is our scene level entity this contains everything in our scene and I'm going to select this and if you notice when you do select this top level entity and of course this can change I can name this whatever I want by doing that actually if you go over to the inspector panel the the top tab which corresponds in name if I open that this pulls up all the metadata for this scene and so I can put a description in here I can change the name and all that stuff there so I'm gonna go and close that and let's move down to the environment all right there are a few different properties available here the background skybox fog and ambient particles and sound we're gonna be covering all of those things here in this twitch broadcast and we're gonna start with the background background is a very simple one and if you expand this there there are two things you can do you can change the color of the background so right now and by default empty entity or empty scenes I should say come with this this gray background and so if I select the color picker and I start moving the color around I can change that background color what do you mean by empty scenes Jake good question an empty scene is a scene that is empty it doesn't have anything in it but a default camera and it has this in a grey background it's I mean there's gonna be some sort of background and every scene it doesn't really count as an entity it's just part of the scene so an empty scene really comes with a camera and that's the only thing we also have a few do we have a few different templates if you start from the dashboard why don't I start from the dashboard I'm gonna exit back to the dashboard and show you what I got um so we'll go home and all right so here's several different scenes I've been working on then if you scroll down you can create a scene from a template so the empty scene is the one we're working on there's also speech and gestures and AR templates and also default lighting the default lighting template is the one I use most often that's because it comes with several different lights that are pretty professionally lit scene so your your hosts look really good your entities look really good and it also has a sky sphere in the background which is something we will be covering so that is a default lighting template a empty scene comes with nothing but a camera and if you and the reason why I have to have a camera is because if you don't have a camera then you can't see anything in your scene so it's by default always there so I'm going back into the scene that I was working on this little this beach scene with some water and waves not quite waves you know kind of like moving calm waters and alright and I changed the background color to this red of course I can change it to any blue or whatever I want and you can also put hex values and also RGB values in there if you want to get real specific so I'll go to this kind of this a light gray to have another question then no question alright Ben was looking at me alright the other thing with the background property is that you can reduce the opacity and if you do this this is really unique for mostly AR scenes and projects you might be working on so if you want to place just the entities that are in your scene you would make sure that you are reducing the opacity of the background down to zero so if that that is part of the and the AR getting started in AR tutorial and that is part of the procedure in steps you would take but that's backgrounds real simple it's just a it's really just a 360 degree background layer to your scene alright we're going to let's see skybox and Scotty R I want to I'll come back to that I'm gonna skip over that and that's gonna be largely what we're gonna be looking at so we'll go on to fog and ambient alright ambient and fog these two kind of work together ambient is the goal in this in the environment tab or the environment component the ambient setting is going to be the ambient settings globally and if you're unfamiliar with like what 3d is or 3d if you're new the 3d world and what ambient means is that it really represents your your entity's darkest darks or another way to think of it how dark does it get when it is in complete shadow so most the time that is fairly dark and but you can lighten that up so if we select this color picker you can increase it and so that this is as dark as it will get is this white or it can get as dark is this and so because we don't have any lights and our scene typically you want this most I shouldn't say typically but a lot of people often use a darker shade for ambient because ambient we'll just make sure that your entities can get dark when they are not lit which kind of makes sense and you can set the ambient for each entity itself so for example if I select this quad which is here there is an and under the North let me pull this up under the material component you'll notice down here there is an ambient setting and it is this this kind of dark grayish color so but you can also let's go back to our environment component so that's how ambient works it really just sets the colors for how dark is an entity or a scene can get fog is another one that is often used and fog really it adds fog to your scene but there are a few different there are a few different things to note about it first of all this color is let's change it to a lighter foggy or looking color and it has two different properties to it fog near and fog far and the way this works is fog near is how cool it's let's see how to I describe this how close to the can or how far away from the camera it does the fog get and also fog far represents conversely how far away from the camera does your scene get completely opaque so let's set this at 1 and then 100 okay so fog near would say it starts at 1 unit away from our camera fog far says anything that's 100 units away from our camera are completely covered in fog so this is a great scene to demonstrate that with so as i zoom out with my camera using my scroll wheel on the mouse you notice the things start getting a little bit more opaque and the farther out I go really can't see much that is that is fog it's a cool it's a it's a pretty cool setting you can use this helpful for just how do you how would you say that it's a good way to just kind of make things look a little more professional I think is the way I would describe it and but that's it there's really not much more to those settings so we've covered backgrounds so far which is just the general color of your background and then fog and ambient we also have particles particles we have there's one particle you can select to turn on which is snow which is an interesting one so I'm going to go ahead and click on snow select that the checkbox and then press play and what happens in my scene I start getting snow which is interesting because I'm on a beach in the middle of the ocean and we get snow you can also increase the velocity and the rate and the height I've been used I haven't had reason to use snow a lot but it is an option is there so that's it let's turn that off and then we'll stop okay and lastly is sound this the sound component or the sound property in the environment component controls all of these the global settings for your sound entities so this is not where you would actually place an audiophile and I actually just realized that I meant to have an audio file to demonstrate this but I don't that's ok the way it works is that if you add a sound entity let's go ahead and add let's go click the Create entity up here above the canvas and I'll select the empty entity here and if I wanted to add a component I can select sound down here and I can drag in a sound file so this can be like a dot mp4 file I was about to say and MOV I don't think this I don't think we actually support a MOV so an mp4 file or mp3 I should say and if you click on that you can just you can set the settings for that file so you can turn up the volume you can make sure it loops or doesn't loop or that the audio starts when you inner play mode so there's a few different things you can do for that but then if you go back to the environment this controls all of the different sounds in your scene and so it controls the total volume and it controls also the 3d settings for that sound audio or that audio file so if we go back to that entity that I created let's say that I had a sound file here and let's see I'm drawing what if I do have a sound file on my computer let me look real quick we're not gonna play anything yeah there we go I'm gonna drop this on here just this alarm sound and I'm gonna edit this there we go so you can set it to loop you can set it to autoplay and this is the one I wanted to mention here is the 3d audio so if I select my entity 2 and this is the entity that I have attached this audio file to and if I look at my transform it's by default at the translation values of zero zero zero and if I that means that that sound file is located actually and it's being emitted from that point in our scene and that center of the world if I have this 3d audio turned on what that means is that like if you're wearing like headphones and you're in and you're in VR for example if you turn right or left that means that you would hear it more in your right ear if you're facing the audio and on the opposite side if you turn left right you know what I mean you would hear it in your left ear so it actually is in 3d space and so it's that sound file is being emitted from somewhere in the scene itself instead of just just ambient noise in the background now the reason that is important is because this roll off factor in max distance has to do with where you can actually hear that that sound file so max distance means how far away how far away can you be from that sound file or that's audio file and still hear it and so if a hundred max distance means that you the the farthest away from that sound file you can be is a hundred units the Roloffs factor has to do with how it rolls off in terms of volume when you start getting when you start leaving or getting further away from that that audio file so for example as I move backwards and I get away from my microphone of course you closer and I'm also probably going closer you can hear me so that's the same thing is that as you get further away from it it actually rolls off and sounds so it gets the the sound and audio gets dimmed a bit so that is sound the last thing that I want to cover is skyboxes and there's a few things to look at in skyboxes I've already created a few so by default I have this skybox for oh I want to turn off my fog there we go and because my background is fine alright so let's go ahead and edit this well actually let's exit first if you didn't have any skybox sky sphere or skybox this is what it would look like drop skybox if you want to start from scratch you can just press the plus button because I've done a few it's showing me skybox five if you haven't done any in your scene it'll just say skybox with no number and let's go ahead and click the edit button to get going here alright skybox a skybox is a infinitely far away box that surrounds your scene and so it has it has a cute map you see down here and it has six different sides just like a cube does and you can put a material or a texture I should say not a material just a texture on each side to reflect whatever image you want and typically those materials are just images or JPEGs or P and G's I'm going to click textures over here to filter down over here my assets panel here I have a bunch of textures and again these are mainly just images so if I want to add a an image or a texture to my cube map for my skybox on you to do and I've already uploaded this cardboard texture I'm just going to go and drag and drop it and as I do that you'll start seeing this skybox take shape then how are we doing on the chat room I got a look at the chat we're doing great everyone's been a little quiet though so okay if you guys got any questions keep keep keep rolling along if you guys got questions asked on the chat happy to answer and we'll keep we'll keep plugging on here if you're curious jam & mu has been and I am J smooster yeah if you haven't figured that out yeah that's who we are alright so going back here as I move around my camera now you can kind of see this box take shape and it does have it does have hard edges meaning that these these it is a it is a physical box really that comes to an edge and has corners so as I move around you can see me zoom down let's see the she can't get out of the way of my there we go kind of kind of looks like you're inside a cardboard box Jake exactly I did that on purpose think of it skybox a huge cardboard box we're all so Amazon so I love cardboard boxes all right so you can see that's how that's how skybox works it has a lot of great uses the other thing that you can use is a sky sphere which we'll look at in just a minute and let me get back up there we go all right moving up through the trees all right this the sky sphere is a pretty interesting one so we've been working on a Sky box and you can you can add multiple images there they don't have to match there doesn't have to be all the same you can have six different images if you want and but that's how it's going to be laid out is that it creates a cube around your scene and notice it it does cover up that background color that we had changed so sky boxes and sky spheres will always sit in front of any background color that you may choose all right so let's remove this texture so we got rid of the sky box now under shape here we can hit this drop down and we can select sphere and sky spheres are typically used 360 degree images that you can use on pretty much any 360-degree camera if you go up to the import assets button up here above the canvas and you go look at the sky boxes pack the sky spheres pack excuse me and it's right here sky spheres pack I've already added it to my scene so I'm just gonna exit out but if you do that you'll notice you get a lot of images that you can that we provide for you to play around with to use if you want and so let's go ahead and see what happens when we drag one of these images to the texture drop in the drop input for a sky sphere so let's look at let's look at this fairway clear okay and it turns black the reason it turns black this is actually a known issue something we discovered today and so to get to fix this which I'm just going to go ahead and reload my scene and when I've been using this today that's been working just fine shouldn't have any issues with that and you'll notice that this is like the sky box it's a infinitely far away background so it exists always on the perimeter year you can't really move your camera to get any closer or further away from the sky sphere oh it didn't take it so let's go ahead and try that I may have not actually saved it well enough okay so I added it let me go and save my scene so as just like with the sky box it works in the same way but it is a sphere surrounding it and so to make that work better it's best to have a 360-degree image versus a sky sky box which allows you to use any sort of 2d image all right so let me let me exit to the dashboard and re-enter this scene who said this is an issue a known issue we are aware of let's open this back up and see what we got and using sky spheres and sky boxes depending on that background it can really dictate where you place your lighting and so that's one thing that we wanted to show you next is if you have a background how does that affect your lighting and where you place your lighting there we go so now we have a 360 degree image and if i zoom out you can see it a little bit better it's an image taken on a fairway on a golf course so there it is that's a that is what a sky sphere is now if I want to edit that and change this I want to go to this default pack here and where was that image there it is alright I mean I want this Nevada day image I'm gonna track that over here okay here we go here's a more kind of realistic looking image for our scene because it's just it almost looks like it's we're at sea right so it has no really ground it just kind of like fades up into sky so it works a lot better with kind of this ocean scene that we've created and let's actually try this one this one's a little bit brighter there we go all right it may notice that the Sun in this image is coming from right over here so let's now add some lights so we can properly light our scene so it fits our environment so I'm gonna click on create entity up here above the canvas and I'm gonna add a directional light if you're new to Cimmerian and you don't know what a directional light is a directional light is used to to mimic sunlight or moonlight or a light source that's in all practice in all practice infinitely far away a source that you're never going to reach now it is actually located in the center of our scene here but it doesn't really matter where I move it the translation values of it that's not going to affect the the lighting in our scene or how it's the light is emitting on our scene what will affect it is its rotation so if I go up to I'll click this rotate to get these rings up here and I'll rotate it this way and because the Sun is kind of coming at this I'm not quite sure what that degree of an angle would be not 45 degrees a little bit less than 45 degrees something like that then let's angle it in a little bit so now we're starting to light our scene to match the background that we hear this sky sphere that we have in our scene I can also if I have my light selected I can click shadows to add some shadows to our scene and I can change the different shadow type here and if I press play we should have a scene that is a lot more well reflective and works a lot better with this background scene so now it looks like a much more it actually looks like an ocean scene kind of a dusk and it has some shadows too let's kind of lets angle that down a little bit more so little a little too horizontal so yeah now it's now this scene is starting to look a little bit more or less that's great so that is lighting and sky spheres and the last thing we want to do is look at a different way you can create sky spheres the reason why is because look at this if i zoom out you can kind of start seeing that the sky sphere hasn't moved our background is still the same now it looks like we have this scene that's just kind of floating in the middle here and that work that might work for a lot of different use cases but say that you want to make something that's a little bit more concealed or not concealed but a little bit smaller so it's like one scene all just within each other well there's another way to do this and I actually just discovered that this morning this is actually pretty cool check it out we got to create entity and I select a sphere and I couldn't stop my scene creates a sphere in the middle of our scene right now if I increase that sphere to so I'm actually just gonna be making my own sphere if I increase that to 200 we have a sphere now on the outside on the perimeter that really just kind of matches and I'll zoom out here I can probably go a little bit more let's go to 275 let's go 300 all right that's good so now we have our scene concealed within or retained within this sphere the issue is is that we can't actually see the inside of the sphere from inside the sphere the way you can fix that is if you go to your scale so instead of 300 you do negative 300 now we have a scene that is completely enclosed within this sphere and if we zoom out and kind of start seeing that you can only see from the inside of that sphere now let's add an image to this sphere to make it so it actually looks like a background or a sky of some kind so I go to my material and under color diffuse right now we just have this light gray color which looks back out which is that color there but if we take that same 360-degree image we apply it as a sky sphere and I apply that to the color diffuse then it starts looking it actually attaches itself to this image it's like well kind of but it's also it's a little bit not backwards it's a sideways how do we change that real simple all you need to do is rotate it around the I believe x-axis yes that way this way to 90 degrees now we're starting to get a sky sphere that makes it a more localized sky sphere and if we wanted to it looks a little bit dark remember this has to do with like the ambient settings and how the the color of this sphere is actually being emitted let's go now look at the the emissive color here it's pretty dark so let's increase that so starts looking a little bit brighter there we go now when I was making this earlier kind of running through this I started thinking I was like this is a lot like the Truman Show it's like from from here it looks kind of inside of us then you start moving out a little bit nothing doesn't look realistic you just start seeing that like oh there actually that sky has a perimeter just like in the Truman Show if you've seen that movie the very end when he runs into the wall but now we now it's not just this floating scene in the middle of the sky sphere it's a localized let's look at play notes old stop four we have another noise issue you're having noises but I'm not hearing anything in here so hmm interesting okay yeah I mean there's nothing no noises in here looks like my audio is all good all right so if you notice though that we have the light kind of coming from the wrong direction are you having notifications on your browser for twitch that are going through your computer I don't have any I do not have my system audio turned on so I should not be having any of that the ball oh I'll turn off just make sure it's the scene nice according to everyone online so you have a noisy ball a noisy ball is it that oh you know what it could be it could be that that siren is it the siren did you not take that off the ball I don't think I took it off the ball haha see that troubleshooting troubleshooting route source troubleshooting all right that's weird I feel like I'm learning something about this software every single day every single week where the sound is actually coming from hey twitch stream viewers thanks for the troubleshooting we appreciate it thanks guys let's see so let's see where was I looking at this light and I need to stop my scene triangle Obul and I want to rotate it this way so again make it look like it's coming from yeah I don't see you sharing your screen at this point Jake there we go all right here we go so I just all I did was rotate this light so it is actually coming from the same direction as the light in our almost more like that Jake you're not sharing yeah there you go yeah okay all right so that is a another way that you can do sky spheres sky boxes there's a lot of different possibilities and some really cool stuff you can do you can use the settings in the environment tab or the environment component additionally you can create your own that might be more unique and more useful for what you're trying to do and also just based on your scene size as well that is that is pretty much all I had planned to uncovering here I'm trying to think from Oh post-effects I did want to cover post effects it's driving us in post let's look at some post effects post effects are another thing it's not really the environment technically it's not under the environment component but it does have a lot to do with you know creating an environment experience this light is why is that light so bright let me look at this light component and turn down the intensity there we go all right and go back to my top level scene level entity and we'll go add effects and you have a bunch of different effects here you can use and the way to understand post effects is just think of it like a an image filter effect for your scene so just mess around with some of these will add bloom and it's just super bright you can decrease that a little bit so it kind of has this glowy bloomie effect to it get a mess with the gain intensity of all that yeah we'll take that one off let's look at blur yeah nothing I mean most of them are fairly descriptive what they are and some of them are let's look at how did you be redshift yes so that this RGB redshift would be for like 3d or you know I using 3d glasses remember that I guess that's still a thing yeah so that's that is how use let's look at the dot the dot ones kind of a cool one oh wow that's that is super noisy kind of try to change that so that is a post effects and how they can affect your scene again some like some people get really crazy with Photoshop or you know Photoshop for Instagram filters you can do the same thing with post effects you can add as many as you want and just depending what you're trying to accomplish they may work so it occur egde you to mess around with those be aware that there are some components that you do that you need to turn your post effects off when you're trying to use for example the HTML 3d entity which you're trying to like stream video or something in there those post effects you can mess with that in a published scene so just be aware that post effects can't affect certain components within Cimmerian but other than that that covers the the most the basics of customizing your environment there any other questions that I need to address we want to ask see anything Ben and I currently we're pretty much caught up on the questions okay great Jimmy I apologize about that sound one of these days we're not gonna have any sound issues I'm looking forward to that day Ben any comments anything on your mind hmm there's lots on my mind but nothing else on skyboxes oh we've got a question let's see show you a link can I email you my question yes you can the best way to do that actually is join slack and you can message us there that's the best way to get messages to us so yeah if you could do that my name is AWS - Jake on the slack channel I'll go and throw that up real quick and so there it is yeah at that if you if you have any questions for us that'd be great we can also if you want to type in your question we can definitely we can wait around for a minute too an animated skybox is that a question can you animate a skybox moving moving clouds that is something I'd have to look into and get back to on I don't know of a way to do that but I'm sure there is a way because I haven't tried it yet good question though so yeah let me look into that everyone just a reminder you can find us here on Tuesdays at 1:30 p.m. Pacific we're on Episode six that means we've got a few more to go at this point before we wrap up this series I'm sure we'll do another one later on in the summer you can find the schedule of events at aws.amazon.com slash twitch or you can follow us either myself at jamon mu on Twitter or Jake Jake what's your Twitter handle my twitter handle is Jake's mr. OH keeping it easy easy to remember yeah it makes it easy and if you can follow us we're constantly posting about the about the the streams that we're doing and in addition join the slack channel that's the best place to get information I know that we keep plugging it but there's a great developer community that's been forming there there's also a large group of AWS engineers that work on the Cimmerian team that are monitoring that slack and so you can get questions to them directly and they'll be able to help you out throughout the day so it's a great resource that's slack Sumerian dot world on the most let's stick it in the chat again just to remind you cool we did have some other questions fluid objects within an object let's see the I'm not sure I understand that question if you want to see you know the person that asked that question fluid object with an object if you in a Labrador in there I would love to answer that or try to answer that can it texture be a movie click over myself here yes it can is the short answer but it really depends on your size of your movie and your video file so make sure it is an mp4 file and you can drag and drop it onto your scene give it a shot it's actually kind of fun to work with so yes you could probably do a lot more with it using scripts however and like s3 possibly is another is another avenue you could take to pull in objects in video files so ya z Tim ster great question alright I'll throw out another questions you can you can also keep asking us questions here in the chat pod in the chat room even after we sign off so that's also something you can do find us on slack Sumeria net world and yeah I love to interact with you love you guys are joining us thank you so much and keep asking the questions keep creating and exploring and we will see you back here 1:30 p.m. Tuesday of next week thanks all thanks

Channel: Amazon Web Services

Views: 3,013

Rating: 5 out of 5

Keywords: AWS, Amazon Web Services, Cloud, cloud computing, AWS Cloud, virtual reality, augmented reality, mixed reality, Amazon Sumerian, VR, AR, 3D, Oculus Go

Id: 7BwIPFRFHjY

Length: 41min 49sec (2509 seconds)

Published: Fri Jun 15 2018