Due to the outbreak of Covid-19 in the year 2020 the in-person Burning Man festival was cancelled but several Virtual Playas were created to give burners a chance to take part without having to be physically present.
I was lucky enough to be asked to help two great camps re-imagine their camps in VR for Burning Man 2020. Bubbles & Bass and Celtic Chaos both were looking for Unity development so I reached out.
For the Bubbles & Bass camp I made a really neat audio reactive shader using Unity’s Shader Graph, helped teach some Unity biz, and I made a dope little twitch api plugin that shot live twitch comments out of a unity-3d cannon.
After a while I cleaned up my audio-reactive shader-graph shader and made a focus video out of it too.
The Celtic Chaos camp has a huge amount of content – we got all the stuff: high fidelity models of actual camp sculptures, actual camp architecture, audio reactive content, and brand new fantasy content. I also helped manage between vendors and content – not very exciting but very necessary. Finally, I was QA – making sure that the 3D models were all under the stringent polygon counts, the textures were super optimized, the models were placed and the lighting maps were all correctly baked.
The best thing about both camps was that they had live twitch streams so that the premade virtual worlds could blend with live music.
VR Burning Man was so much fun. It was great to connect to so many extremely dedicated people!