Project Graveyard – Devlog 006

Improving the workflow for new records and working on adding Lamp Post entities.

Creating new records

In the last few versions, tapping the Add button in the toolbar would open a popover using a Presentation Component. This popover contained a SwiftUI form containing with some text fields. Users would have to enter a name value and tap the Save button to create a gravestone. This new gravestone was placed in the center of the graveyard.

This week I decided to revamp this process. When we tap the Add button now, a few things happen.

• A random position is calculated
• An empty gravestone is placed at the position
• A particle effect is played to draw attention
• After a short delay, the Options popover opens above the new item

I removed the Add card entirely and now the user only has to learn one place to enter gravestone text. Check out the video for a closer look.

Lamp Post

The Graveyard is a little light on details. We have a ground, a fence, some dead trees and a few stone tiles. I’m going start adding new articles of flare so it is time to rework things. I pulled the dead trees and stone tiles out. The first asset I’m working on is a Lamp Post. The scene is lit using Image Based Lighting and will use the headset environment settings by default. This lamp post will add a bit of ambient light, but not enough to light the entire scene.

I started with this model from The Base Mesh. I imported the .obj file in Blender and made a small change. In Edit Mode, I selected the 4 glass panes and added them to a new Glass material slot. I grouped all other faces under the LampBody slot. The materials themselves don’t matter, I just wanted the slots. I exported the file as a USDC file and added it to my Reality Composer Pro project. Interestingly, this is the first time I didn’t get that warning about default prim. Blender is now automatically adding the /root value for us.

I created a new scene called LampPost01 and dragged in the new item. Taking a look at the hierarchy, we can see that the mesh has two child objects. One for the LampBody and one for the Glass. Both of these have default materials imported from Blender. I ignored these and replaced them with new materials in RCP. I used ScratchedMetallicPaint from the Content Library for the LampBody and a simple PBR for the stylized Glass. I placed a Spotlight entity inside the lamp and adjusted the values to get the amount of light I wanted.

This is a hacky way to do things, but I like using the materials in Reality Composer Pro. Take a look at the result.

Both of these features are available to try in the new TestFlight version (3.0 build 3). The lamps should be considered Preview only since I haven’t decided how I’m going to incorporate them into the app.