Difference between revisions of "Creating A Shop"

space for merchants

The space platform is designed to give creators the best tools for showing and selling their work.

This How To guide is based on the Mirage shop template which you can download and modify yourself from here

We will cover;

• Creating a shop
• Vending machines
• Virtual goods

Creating a shop

The Mirage region is built without using any 3D modelling or mesh creation tools at all. Everything in the region has been created with Unity or Photoshop. The region is approximately 90mb to upload and XX download for users. It runs in the desktop player, webgl and mobile/tablet.

Exterior

The Mirage shop template region has no terrain or water, there is a only a basic skybox.

The building

The walls and floors and all the interior props were built using basic primitive shapes in Unity. These can be added to your scene, sized and positioned using the Unity editor's standard gizmos.

Once a building has been created, you can add materials to your objects, to combine textures and shaders and create detailed and attractive spaces.

Logos; simple text extrusion

The logo above the door was extruded from text using Photoshop and saved as an fbx file. You can also use Blender to do this.

Textures and materials

Unity offers a huge array of options for physical materials. You can buy cool materials and shaders in the Unity Asset Store; you can even create your own. just the Standard Shader which will automatically be applied to any new material you create provides you with enormous power when it comes to creating the look and feel of your space.

This region has two different wooden floors and concrete walls. It also has glass panels, plastic fittings and some leather stools, all created using the Unity standard shader.

Mirrors

The region also has two mirrors, one in the entrance hall and one in the main store room.

Details on how to create mirrors can be found here and here.

It is worth noting that mirrors like these have almost no performance impact; Big mirrors like these will not cause lag in your regions.

Lighting and Reflections

The lighting in this scene is described in more detail in our How To Light Interiors.

The different types of lights in this scene are;

• Ambient light
• Area lights
• Point lights
• Emissive surfaces

Baking

Once all the lights and reflection probes are laid out, if you are baking anything (instead of using realtime lighting for everything)

Baked lights have their impact on textures and light probes applied during a one click bake process in Unity before you upload your region. The actual light source is then not used inworld. This improves inworld performance; your frame rate will be higher; but it increases the size of the download by creating lightmaps; large textures that blend with the scene textures to deliver the impact of the original light source.

Realtime lights are physical lights operating in your scene. They can cast live shadows on moving objects in your scene. Lots of lights may have an impact on performance but they reduce the size of the region when it is downloaded by your visitors.

Reflection probes

Reflection probes influence all the static and moving shiny surfaces in the scene.

That includes the glass shelves and metal lights in this scene, and any metallic or shiny surfaces worn by visitors.

Once laid out reflections probes can be baked into the scene like light probes.

Animated Doors

space creators can easily keyframe animate a huge variety of attributes of inworld objects; not just position and rotation but colour, light intensity, etc.

In this scene the doors have been designed to open and close in response to a proximity trigger. No scripting is needed to build interactive components like this. For more detail on animated doors see here.

Vending machines

The Mirage demo scene contains two types of vending machine;

• Catalogue – displays all virtual goods with a specific brand name that you define
• Preview – Displays a specific product in preview window

Setting up these vending machines is described in more detail here and here.

NPCs

The Mirage demo scene contains three NPCs, each dressed wearing a skin that is also on sale in the store.

Setting up NPCs is really simple in space and the process is described here and here.

Virtual goods

Whatever products you are selling, from whole regions to clothes, accessories, furniture or gestures, all you need to do is add the virtual good component to each asset and upload it to the store.