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Handling head clipping

paulleblond
Honored Guest
I've read through the best practices guide, but I don't recall seeing anything regarding handling when someone looks TOO closely at something. This seems like it'll be an even bigger issue with positional tracking.

The only things I've thought of are:

-Allow the head to enter the object, so the player can see inside stuff. Seems like it would break immersion pretty bad.
-Stop the camera from moving too far. This seems like it would work better, but breaks the rule of "head movement always matches camera movement"
-Fade/cut vision to black so nothing can be seen til the player's head leaves the object. This seems like the best answer, but not particularly easy to implement (at least for a newbie like me)

What have you done to handle this problem?

(FYI I don't have a rift. Trying to develop without til CV1, so I don't have experience with demos to see how they've handled this)
13 REPLIES 13

raidho36
Explorer
Nobody does nothing about it, unsurprisingly. The matter is just too rare to give two damns about. Also just make near clipping plane something like 1 millimeter, that'll make it pretty much impossible to "dive" into objects without sinking your camera in there. Oh and it's kinda really bad idea to develop Rift-enabled visuals without having the Rift to see what it actually looks like.

grodenglaive
Honored Guest
"paulleblond" wrote:
I've read through the best practices guide, but I don't recall seeing anything regarding handling when someone looks TOO closely at something. This seems like it'll be an even bigger issue with positional tracking.

The only things I've thought of are:

-Allow the head to enter the object, so the player can see inside stuff. Seems like it would break immersion pretty bad.
-Stop the camera from moving too far. This seems like it would work better, but breaks the rule of "head movement always matches camera movement"
-Fade/cut vision to black so nothing can be seen til the player's head leaves the object. This seems like the best answer, but not particularly easy to implement (at least for a newbie like me)

What have you done to handle this problem?

(FYI I don't have a rift. Trying to develop without til CV1, so I don't have experience with demos to see how they've handled this)

Just make sure the player collider is slightly bigger than the near clipping plane (i.e. stop the camera from moving). It may brake that rule, but you learn pretty quickly to not bang your head into the wall if it makes you nauseous. 🙂
I think having the screen turn black instead would be more annoying.
GA-Z97X-gaming gt; i5-4670k; Nvidia780Ti; 16GB PC3-17066; win7-64 bit; DK2

Lane
Honored Guest
"raidho36" wrote:
Nobody does nothing about it, unsurprisingly. The matter is just too rare to give two damns about. Also just make near clipping plane something like 1 millimeter, that'll make it pretty much impossible to "dive" into objects without sinking your camera in there. Oh and it's kinda really bad idea to develop Rift-enabled visuals without having the Rift to see what it actually looks like.


The short near clipping is good, but would require some extra solution(s) in regards to body/head models being attached to the character and the clipping plane being inside the avatar's face... Assuming you have a body model in the first place.

I agree if you're doing any development with the Rift then get the DK immediately.

raidho36
Explorer
Well avatar model should only include what should be visible. Since you shouldn't see your own head, the model just shouldn't include it.

Lane
Honored Guest
Yep, which in turn means detaching the head from all avatars that a player could use. Definitely something you'd want to start implementing earlier than later.

I don't see much other way to handle it. Is there a way to occlude specific faces or chunks of a model or defined boundaries?

raidho36
Explorer
Nope, obviously. Model is a contiguous array of vertex data and it's rendered in one call. You can try scaling the head bones into zero which will result scaling the head polygons into null size point. But you will want different first person model from third person model in the first place, so why bother.

paulleblond
Honored Guest
Thanks for the feedback, I'll make the near clipping plane as close as I can and toy with collision later once I have a rift. I haven't bought the DK1 because I have a bad habit of starting projects and not finishing them, so I don't want to be 300 bucks in and fail to follow through. Thanks again!

karrtoon
Expert Protege
yes I would do the near clipping very low, But also for the collision I would make it so you can't "go through" the object with the positional tracking.. but can still slide up down left right in the other available directions.

I would not cut out the positional tracking completely if you collide into something as that would be very disorienting. (pretty much like dk1 when moving your body around)

If done properly this can work quite well. Picture a wall on your right, if you lean into it the tracking in that direction stops.. but you could still lean forward, backward, up, down, just not right any further in the game.

I think this kind of stuff should really be in the best practices guide for when dk2 comes out.

Clipping through the wall just doesn't seem like a good idea to me.

Here is a great blog post about this very subject in more detail: http://doc-ok.org/?p=785

Gerald
Expert Protege
"raidho36" wrote:
Nobody does nothing about it, unsurprisingly.


This is not true - at least not with the DK2. In many scenarios you will be close to a wall or similar objects and it can easily happen that you move through an object. You can not stop the tracking, that will make people sick.
So just live with it.

Keeping the near clipping at a minimum is very important too, because otherwise you do see weird effects like objects suddenly disappearing before your eyes (not in your eye).

My approach, since I do not try to simulate the real world, is to keep the player away from walls. He can't get close enough to clip through them. Imagine sitting in an UFO where you have the UFO holding you away from walls. The UFO can bump against them and that feels right, but you can't reach them with your head.
I do have some holographic displays the player will be able to go through, but that is actually rather fun and works well with a hologram.
A player is able to force clipping - but I think I avoided all accidental clipping. 🙂
check out my Mobile VR Jam 2015 title Guns N' Dragons