If you don't have the Unity 3D game engine application installed on your PC yet, do that now! The full-featured Personal Edition is free and runs on both Windows and Mac. To get Unity, go to https://store.unity.com/, select the version that you want, click on Download Installer, and continue following the instructions. This book assumes you have version 2017.2 or later of Unity.

For you beginners out there, we're going to take this first section nice and slow, with more hand-holding than what you'll get later on in the book. Furthermore, even if you already know Unity and have developed your own games, it may be worthwhile to revisit the fundamental concepts, since the rules are sometimes different when designing for virtual reality.

Now, we will add a few objects to the scene to set up the environment, including a unit cube, a flat plane, a red ball, and a photographic backdrop. Here is a photograph of a physical mock-up of the diorama we will build in VR:

Let's add the first object to the scene: a unit-sized cube.

Within the Hierarchy panel, use the Create menu and choose 3D Object | Cube. The same selection can also be found in the main menu bar's GameObject drop-down menu.

A default white cube is added to the scene, centered on the ground plane at the (0, 0, 0) position, with no rotation, and a scale of one, as you can see in the Inspector panel. This is the Reset setting, which can be found in the...

We've created a Unity scene, added a few primitive 3D objects, and created a couple of basic textures, including a photograph. Along the way, we learned about positioning and transforming objects in Unity's 3D world space. The problem is that the actual size of stuff in your scene is not always obvious. You could be zoomed up or you may be using either a Perspective or Orthographic view, or other features that affect the apparent size. Let's look at ways to deal with the scale.

I suggest keeping a unit cube handy in your Hierarchy panel. When it's not needed, just disable it (uncheck the checkbox in the top left-hand side of the Inspector panel). It can be used...

So far we have shown you how to use Unity and be productive creating a scene, but with pretty simple content. Inherently, Unity is not a 3D modeling or asset creation tool. Rather (as the name Unity suggests), it's a unified platform for pulling together content from a variety of sources to assemble and program a game or experience involving animation, physics, rendering effects, and so on. If you are a 3D artist you may know how to create content in other programs like Blender, 3D Studio Max, or Maya. If not, you can find a plethora of models on the web.

One terrific source is the Unity Asset Store (https://www.assetstore.unity3d.com/en/). Many asset packs are free, especially starter ones, with possible paid upgrades if you want more. If you are looking for a few things to get your learning and experimental projects going, here are some of my free...

Unity offers some basic geometric shapes, but when it comes to more complex models, you'll need to go beyond Unity. As we discussed, the Unity Asset Store and many sites have tons of amazing models. Where do they come from? Will you run into problems while importing them into Unity?

I know that this book is about Unity, but we're going on a short side adventure right now. We're going to use Blender (version 2.7x), a free and open source 3D animation suite (http://www.blender.org/), to make a model and then import it into Unity. Grab a coffee and strap yourself in!

The plan is not to build anything very fancy right now. We'll just make a cube and a simple texture map. The purpose of this exercise is to find out how well a one-unit cube in Blender imports with the same scale and orientation into Unity.

Feel free to skip this section...

In addition to traditional 3D modeling software like Blender (and ZBrush, 3D Studio Max, Maya, and so on) there is a new generation of 3D design apps that let you to directly create inside VR. After all, it's pretty awkward trying to use an inherently 2D desktop screen with a 2D mouse to form, sculpt, assemble, and manipulate 3D models. If only it could be more like real-life sculpture and construction. So, why not just do it directly in 3D? In VR!

Like other digital platforms, we can categorize VR apps into ones that present an experience, ones where you interact to engage with the environment, and ones where you actually create content, for yourself or for sharing. An example of the latter and one of the first to be widely successful is Google Tilt Brush (https://www.tiltbrush.com/) where you paint in 3D. This is one my favorite go-to apps when...

In this chapter, we have learned about the Unity Editor—a tool for creating 3D scenes and projects on a 2D computer screen. We also learned a bit about Blender—a tool for creating 3D assets on at 2D computer screen. Then we progressed to the new generation of 3D asset creation tools in virtual reality including Tilt Brush and Poly. Now we'll explore creating VR scenes directly in virtual reality too!

Unity EditorXR (EXR) is a new experimental feature of Unity (at time of writing) where you can edit your 3D scenes directly in VR rather than on your 2D monitor. In this section, we may be getting ahead of ourselves in more ways than one. This is both an advanced topic and an experimental one. If you are just getting started with VR, or if you are just getting started with Unity, you may want to skip this topic for now and come...

In this chapter, we built a simple diorama, became more acquainted with the Unity editor, and learned about the importance of world scale in designing your scenes, including several in-game tools to help us work with scaling and positioning.

We then emphasized that Unity is not so much an asset creation tool. Developers typically use tools outside of Unity and then import their models. We introduced you to the free and open source Blender modeling app as well as Google Tilt Brush and showed you how to export assets and then import them into Unity, including cloud services like Google Poly.

One of the really cool things about developing for VR is how quickly things are changing. It's the burgeoning of a new industry, a new media, and new paradigms evolve year to year as VR comes into its own. New devices are being introduced every quarter. Unity is updated every month...