Global Scale / Units & Clipping Planes = Day-Long Rabbit Hole

The challenge slide led me down a rabbit hole as I quickly ran into several obstacles pertaining to scale, size and clipping planes (camera and also Project Quality settings for shadow distance). It became immediately obvious that the size of the canvas was waaaay too large once bringing it into the World Space. I then began to “normalize” the environment based on the size of the canvas by building reference objects, such as walls and faux backboards, etc. Unfortunately, I started the wrong way by creating everything waaay too large, whereby, I ran into the max distances in my camera’s far clipping plane as well as losing my shadows. I started messing with increasing the far clipping plane on the camera and increasing the shadow distance on the project quality settings in order to get my shadows back. Being that this is a VR project, and remembering a tip from the 3D world that you should model (whenever possible) to-scale for greatest realism, I realized I was going the wrong way. I started asking myself, how tall is a person in this world? What are the world units? How big is X? et. al. I then placed my Player GameObject 1.6 units/meters above the floor thinking that is about the eye level of a human shooting basketball. I turned to wiki for the dimensions of a basketball court here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Basketball_court I then rescaled my walls and basketball to more realistic dimensions that better-reflect the real world. Here are some screenshots of my scenes based on a day’s detour from a simple challenge slide:

Menu Scene (added a simple cube behind canvas to cast shadows)

Play Scene with Scoreboard & Faux Backboard (FPO)

Game Over Scene

Rest of Court Behind the Player (“Built to Scale”)

2 Likes

The scoreboard is amazing! I am adding Vive support to my project and may have to follow your example to build a true arena for RoomScale.

1 Like

Privacy & Terms