Welcome everybody to part nine of my Unity VR guide. Today we'll be going over how to make doors and drawers. We'll cover how to make a door, how to prevent unwanted physics interactions between interactables and ourselves, and how to make drawers that open and close.

If you haven't been following this series, no worries! Every part is modular and can be done independently from all the others. Just download the GitHub project provided below, open up the project, and go to the corresponding scene to follow along if you like. A written tutorial can also be found in a link below.

Opening up the project and going to the right scene, which is going to be this part 9: doors and drawers, we are going to be greeted with this scene. Imagine that doors and drawers are present, and if you wanted to use these assets or look at some different ones, these are actually from a developer or artist known as Alstra Infinite. I'll provide the links to that below in the description. You should definitely check it out because these are pretty nice free assets that they offer. Besides that, we have our locomotion system with a continuous move provider and a snap turn provider. On the XR origin, again we have our ray interactors as well as direct interactors on our left and right hand controllers.

So let's kick things off by learning how to make a door open in VR. If we open up the door here—hahaha, what a great pun!—we have a door frame that has these three components to it with colliders on them. Then we have a door body which consists of the body itself and two door handles, one in the front and one in the back.

We also have colliders, so the first question we have to ask ourselves is how do we make this door open? Well, I think a good way to start is by making it a grab interactable. So let's go ahead and click the door body. We don't want to do it on the door

itself because that includes the frame. So we don't want to open the frame with the door, you know? So let's start by adding an XR Grab Interactable to it, and that's also going to add a rigid body. For the rigid body, let's make it

continuous dynamic. That's just going to make sure if we move the door quickly, that it's going to register collisions with it correctly, or a little more accurately. Then, on movement type, instead of instantaneous, let's have it be velocity tracking. We want it to kind

of mimic the physics of, you know, if we swing the door open and let it go, it's going to maintain that velocity instead of just being instantaneous with our hand. Now, before we start up the scene and test things out, right now it's using the door body as the collider to grab

the door, and we want it to use these handles. So we come down here where the colliders are in XR Grab Interactable, add these plus signs, and then we're going to drag these door handles in, and start up the scene to see what we have.

Pressing play and grabbing the door handle, you'll see that the door is not really acting like how we need it to. It's kind of just flying everywhere, so let's fix that. In order to fix the door from flying everywhere, we need to limit where it can

Actually, we can move in one way by adding something called a hinge joint. I'm going to go ahead and add that component and explain it. Essentially, a hinge joint acts like a door hinge, so we can use it to control movement.

This angular limit allows us to move this anchor point, which is right here, around where we want it to rotate. We need this pointing upwards, and it should be about here, so I'm going to enter some values really quick.

All right, let's go over some of these changes. For the anchor positioning, I adjusted this to put it in the right position. I want it to rotate around this middle section, and I also changed the axis so it's not rotating on the x-axis or the

z-axis. We want it rotating on the y-axis, so it's pointing upwards. Right now, as it's set, it can actually rotate 360 degrees from this point, and we want to limit that. So we just click 'Use Limits' and we have these toggles

that we can adjust and move, but instead of doing that, I'm just going to type it in here. I'm going to set it to negative 120. What I'm doing here is we're going to grab this handle and kind of walk through or push

the door open, which is kind of what you would expect. So let's press play and see what we have. Just like that, we can grab the door handle, walk through this door, and shut the door. There we go, we've got a working door!

Now there's one last thing I want to point out about our door here, and that's the fact that the colliders are a little misleading. See, you'll notice that I've moved the collider in a little bit, and that's to allow the door to swing

inwards, which will reduce some of the jaggedness when we go to open the door. So when you go and want to create this yourself, as you're creating colliders, just keep that in mind, so you don't run into any problems there. All right,

so now we have a working door, but there's one thing I want to point out as we move along here: this interactable ball that we have. So we have the continuous locomotion system going, and you'll notice if you are using that while grabbing the ball, you can

actually launch yourself around the map, which is pretty disorienting and something we don't want. So to fix that, we are going to change a few things. Starting off, we are going to take this ball and change it to a new layer. I've added a few layers here; I

have an interactable layer and an interactable ignore ray layer, but for this one, we're just going to make it interactable. Then for the XR origin, we are going to change that to body. You know what? It's not really important that it changes for the

children; we just want to make sure the character controller is not colliding with this ball. Finally, we have to change the physics settings here, so we come in here and you can turn these on and off. This is the body intersection, and we're making sure that it's not

interacting with interactables or interactable ignore ray. Now, when we start up the scene, if we're using continuous movement and we grab the ball and kind of collide it with ourselves, we are no longer being thrown around, which is great. All right, so our locomotion system's

working correctly. Now, let's figure out how to make these drawers work. If we click on this and look at different components here, you have this drawer at the very top, and that's going to have a mesh collider, so that'll cover the outside of the drawer. Then

we have a top drawer, a bottom drawer, and the drawer back. Now, the drawer back is just a collider that I have here for when we make this slidable. When it slides out, it's just going to prevent it from flying out the back there, and

let's dive into this. We have the bottom part of the drawer, we have a side, we have a side back, a front, and the handle that we're going to grab onto. So we've mapped out the drawer. Let's get it working, and I'm going to start by using the

top drawer. So, like before, we're going to make it an XR Grab Interactable, and again it adds the rigid body, which I'm going to change to continuous dynamic as well as velocity tracking. Next, we need to limit the direction in which we are pulling the drawer. Right now, if we

grab it, it would just attach to our hands like any other object. We are going to use something called a configurable joint, so I'm going to go ahead and add that component. What this is, is it's kind of like your choose-your-own-adventure of joints. It would

allow you to do essentially any kind of thing that you'd want from a joint. It all depends on how we customize it here, so let me customize this really quickly. All right, and let's run through the changes that I've done here. So starting off, we have the anchor position. I just

want to make sure that it's kind of centered on the object. And then finally, the axis, since this can be customized and go in any direction that I want, I just left it on the x-axis. You can see that the orange arrow is pointing this way, and it looks like we want to have

motion on the z-axis relative to that. And so if we come down here, you can see on the x, y, and z motion, I have locked it. I have locked it, but since we want it to move on the z-axis, I've made it limited. And then finally, we have angular motion

which I've locked for all three because we don't want it rotating. And finally, for linear limit, I have set it to 0.4. So the limit here is going to say on the z-axis it can go 0.4

forwards and backwards, and we don't want it going backwards, but again that is stopped by this collider right here, the drawer back. And so if we start up the scene now, let's see what we have. And as you can see, we can grab the drawer, but

it's a little bit jagged; it's not really working correctly. So let's see if we can fix that. In order to fix this, I'm going to actually move some things around. So originally, we had the XR grab interactable on the top drawer, but I'm

I'm going to now remove it, and I found a better way to put it on the handle itself. We need to give it a rigid body again, so we're going to change that to continuous dynamic as well as velocity tracking. Don't forget that, and what we need to do

from here is add something called a fixed joint. What the fixed joint is going to do is we put a rigid body here, so we're going to use the top drawer, and it is going to say, all right, whatever joint is on the top drawer attached to

that rigid body, we're just going to go with that. Even though you're grabbing this handle, that tends to fix it quite well. The last thing I like to play with is this spring and damper, and you might want to experiment yourself. I found I like a spring of, uh, you know what, let's

try one this time and a damper of about 10 for me. But this is where you need to experiment and see what feels right to you. So with that, let's start it up and see what we have. And just like that, we can grab the drawer; it's sliding out smoother and

yeah, things kind of work. If you want in the project, there's still a drawer left to implement, but besides that, I appreciate you stopping by. Leave me a like if you found this helpful, and I'll see you next time. Bye

Unity VR Game Basics - PART 9 - Doors and Drawers

Unity VR Game Basics - PART 9 - Doors and Drawers

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