Making a VR Music Video
For my final CM project, I decided to make a VR music video. I’m not using any real-live footage so I had to make it myself using graphics and animation. I started this process by gathering the assets I needed and creating the graphics to be displayed in the video. I chose the song “You Don’t Know” by Leon Bridges. It is a fun, crowd-pleaser and doesn’t run past the three minute mark. I haven’t had much animation experience, so I stuck with playing in Premier. I may try and finesse some of the final animations and in which case would probably take me over to After Effects.
My VR world consists of a cube, made up of screens displaying the lyric video. It looks a bit like a scoreboard in the middle of an arena, except my screens are closer to the floor. Once I had my VR world set up, it took some time to learn how to associate videos to the planes that are working as the video screens. First, I had to make a render texture and set that size to the size of my video — 1920 x 1080. Then I needed to make a material and set my rendered texture to the Material’s Albedo and Color emission channels. Next, I needed to assign the material to the actual plane, and you do this by dragging the material to the plane in the workspace. After this, I needed to associate the video with the texture, this is done in the video player object. In the render texture, it must be associated to the target texture field in the video player with the video clip to be played.
Unity took some time to learn, but that is how critical making goes typically. It takes some time to fumble around and sooner or later you start piecing things together and they begin working. It’s a lot like trying to find your way around a completely dark room, sooner or later the surroundings become familiar without the use of sight.
Currently, I have my cube-screen set up and playing my lyric video. I am working on styling the scene, currently using a gradient as the floor. I will be working more on this and will update as it comes more together.
