Looking for some tips/guidance on how to put a new project together

Hi Nirurin,

Welcome to the V3D community. The project you describe can be done in many different ways. You can do it all natively in V3D, you can implement plugins, you can rely on some HTML, CSS and JS as well.

So to start with you need to determine the types of devices that will you will target. Basically will this be something you expect to playback on phones and if so what screen size, resolution and browser. So picking your devices will be important: iphone, tablet, desktop ,etc.

Once you decide on the devices, you need to determine the orientation, portrait, landscape, etc. Then you move on to resolution, what is the smallest resolution you are shooting for.

The above will determine if your project needs to be responsive or can be made to just scale.

For the sake of this discussion I am assuming scaling will be fine.

The next thing you need to do is layout your on screen control. HUD, map/navigation/buttons, etc. Do this for the lowest resolution you have. Once laid out…you can decide if its better the assets be 3D or 2D. If 3D is the answer then you can do all of that inside V3D.
If the answer is they need to be 2D, then you have to decide on your skill set or those that will help you out. You can create the HTML/CSS/JS inside V3D or you can do it outside and just incorporate the scripts you need to access. If you have experienced with HTML/CSS and JS you will probably choose to do that work outside of Verge3D because its so much faster and can be more easily managed.

Now that you have your HTML out of the way…the next step is to decide how you want your user to explore your environment.
If your rooms do not have alot of heavy texture content, and you have optimized the geometry you might be able to load all the rooms in a single file and build the user navigation to allow them to explore all rooms without reloading or appending rooms.

To give you an idea we created an Escape Room Demo – https://webgl.r66dapps.com/escapev1/ It has two rooms…currently but we designed many more to added to it should we ever want to expand it. The number of rooms is not the controlling factor, its the overall scene loading thats more of a limitation. Textures optimization is probably the number one issue. This demo does not use any plugins and only uses native V3d, some HTML, CSS and JS. But this same thing could be easily expanded out to 10 more rooms before we would run out of memory or FPS dropping too low and would be forced to do an append.

Lighting is another huge obsticle. One that you will have to determine at the very beginning. Lighting is one of the biggest issues regarding performance for V3D. The number of redraws is mulitplied signifiantly for each light. So my recommendation is don’t use any. You will have to light your scene in Blender, bake your textures, turn off all your lighting and then use a single HDR to light your scene. The baked textures will take care of your shadows and lights. If you have animated characters or live shadows… you are better off creating a shadow plane and animating it with your character via maps than use realtime shadows. The performance hits are very large.

Anyway..hope this helps.