Making “Home Basement” a VRChat World

After getting comfortable with 3D modeling in Blender I decided to put those skill to use and create a VR world. I started with a base model of a room in Blender. I also created a staircase from scratch. This process taught me that working with meshes is something that should be done in small steps with a lot of planning. Both of which I did not do. I spent the majority of time fixing issues. But the final result came up pretty well.

Next, I imported the base into Unity. The ability to export FBX from Blender and import into Unity is the part of the process that seemed to work smoothest. It was easy to move between Blender and Unity whenever I need add something or change the mesh. Here’s an early version in Unity:

I then started setting up all the lights correctly and baking them. This was extremely tedious. For my next world I’ll try using Bakery instead of the built in Unity light baking tools. Last I added some music, toggles, and a mirror. After uploading, version one looked like this:

The room felt large and empty. I added a large column to middle of the room. I also lowered all the lights, making the room feel cozier and creating a greater sense of discovery as you move through it. In addition, I used a complementary color scheme of blue and yellow. Here’s the result:

I made a few more tweaks after this and went through the process of creating a quest version of the world. This involved a lot more tweaking of the light mapping and using VRCToolKit and EasyQuestSwitch to get everything working. The final world is available now in VRC Community Labs.