what does it feel like to be in the Harry Potter Universe? I wanted to recreate some Harry Potter spells in VR using Unity to see for myself, but before I could start making any spells, I needed an environment to do all my spell casting in. In my last project where I created Goku's Kamehameha power from Dragon Ball Z, my initial environment was just a floating platform. This time, I decided to see if I could find a more interesting environment to start off in. I searched the Unity Asset Store for some free environments that gave off some Harry Pottery Vibes, and eventually ended up on this model called Sponsor. It had some costly Hogwartsy Vibes, so I went with it. Turns out, this is actually a 3D model of a real palace in Croatia, but whatever, it was now my knockoff Hogwarts. I downloaded it, placed it in my scene in Unity, and hopped in VR to see what it looked like. I was happy with it, so I had my knockoff Hogwarts. Next,

needed a wand. I thought I could easily create a wand by using Unity's built-in cylinder object and scaling it down to the right size, but I think the SteamVR scripts really weren't happy with the scaling. I spent a good while trying to position the wand so that it would pick up nicely, but it really wasn't working. In the end, I decided to take another look in the Asset Store to see if I could find any cool wand models. I found a nice set of ones to choose from, which all looked far better than my bland cylinder. Anyway, I'll leave links to all the assets that I used for this project in the description of this video. After adding in one of the wands from the wand asset pack, everything was working quite nicely. It was finally time to add some magic. I figured I would start off with something simple to get the ball rolling. One of the simplest spells used throughout the Harry Potter series is Lumos, the wand lighting charm. It illuminates the tip of the caster's wand to light up dark areas.

I created a new script to add to the wand called lumos. The idea was quite simple. I just wanted it to instantiate an object with a light at the tip of the wand when I press a button, and remove it when I press the button again. I also needed to make sure that this only happened when I was actually holding the wand. Here's what my first attempt looked like: not so magical. The environment was already quite brightly lit, and without the recognizable glow and whistle sound of the lumos spell, it felt quite underwhelming. So, I made the environment much darker and got to work on adding a little glow to the tip of the wand when the spell was activated. I cheated a little bit here by reusing a Shader that I had created for another project that makes glowy spheres. I also enabled bloom in the post-processing effects to give bright lights an extra glowy look. Those changes made a really big difference, the main big difference being it was now really difficult to find my wand in the dark. When I did manage to find it though, my

lumos was looking much cooler. The last thing it needed was a sound effect. I found the lumos sound effect online and included it so that it would play whenever I activated or deactivated the spell. I also added a little bit of pitch variation so that the sound wasn't so repetitive, along with some smoothing to the appearance and disappearance of the glow effect, so it didn't just pop in and out instantly. With all that done, here's what my finished lumos looked like. I'm quite pleased with the overall effect. Exploring the dark, castly environment with lumos really does feel somewhat magical. Just make sure PS1 Hagrid doesn't sneak up on you from the darkness and get you. Ah, so far I had been moving around with SteamVR's built-in teleporting system, but I wanted to be able to move around more freely and naturally. So, I decided to remove the teleport system and add in analog stick movement. This was quite simple to do. I just had to get the analog stick input from the left hand controller and apply

that input to the position of the player, based on the direction the player's head was facing. Of course, I completely forgot to lock the movement in the y direction, which meant I could fly. This wasn't very realistic, as we all know you can only fly if you have a broomstick. I fixed that little mistake, and now I could walk around instead of teleporting. Walking around felt much more mysterious than teleporting. Next, I wanted to add another spell. The obvious choice for something a bit more interesting than Lumos, and perhaps even more iconic, was Expelliarmus, the disarming charm. Expelliarmus forces whatever the target is holding to fly out of their hands. There are several times in the Harry Potter movies where this spell actually knocks people back rather than just disarming them. Though to create this spell in Unity, I started with a similar approach to the Lumos. I created a script called Expelliarmus, which would instantiate an Expelliarmus game object at the tip of the wand when I pressed a button. I also created a

script called Expelliarmus projectile that would be applied to all Expelliarmus game objects to control their movement, and what would happen when they hit something. I needed to create an Expelliarmus game object before I could instantiate it, though, which I initially made by copying the Lumos game object and adding a trail renderer to it to accentuate the movement. Back in the Expelliarmus script, when I instantiated the projectile, I told it which direction to move in by subtracting the position of the wand's tip from the position of the center of the wand, which gave us the direction that the wand was pointing in. That did kind of work, but I had set the projectile to move way too fast. That, plus the presence of a trail renderer, made it seem like I had created a spell which shoots a laser beam rather than an actual projectile. Tweaking the speed and duration of the trail renderer gave me something that was a bit more like what I was expecting. I had accidentally set up the button to be a toggle rather than a regular bun.

which meant nothing would happen every other time I clicked the button to fire an Expelliarmus. Some of my attempts at fixing this had some unexpected rapid fire consequences. I eventually had it behaving how I wanted it to; every time I clicked the button, an Expelliarmus would fire, and I could fire them as fast as I could press the button. My Expelliarmus still didn't quite look or sound as good as I'd have liked, but I got distracted. I had removed Lumos in order to make way for my Expelliarmus, and that just didn't sit right with me. A true witch or wizard can cast any number of spells, not just one. I wanted to be able to switch between spells and use both whenever I wanted without having to edit the game in Unity. To enable that, I created a new script called Spell Changer, which would keep track of all my spells and switch between them when I pressed a button. With that added, I could switch between my Expelliarmus and Lumos at will. Then I got even more distracted when I

had a realization. Why settle for just one wand if I had two ones? I could cast Lumos with one while firing Expelliarmus with the other, immediately surpassing the skill of Harry Potter or even he who must not be named. JK Rowling would be disgusted. Anyway, enough jewel wand-wielding bizareness. It was time to make my Expelliarmus look, feel, and sound a bit less harmless. The best way I know to make something look cooler in unity is with particle effects. So, I opened up the particle effect graph to create something to improve my Expelliarmus. I eventually ended up with this cool, wispy, fiery-looking effect, which really made the Expelliarmus look much more exciting. I realized that I needed the Expelliarmus to actually do something when it hits a target. It's supposed to disarm your opponent by knocking their wand out of their hand. To make that happen, I needed an actual opponent. In the end, I settled on just a training dummy for now. I found this handsome dark wizard on

sketchfab link in the description. I awkwardly attached a wand to his hand so that I could disarm him later, but before that, I thought it would be cool to just knock some objects around with my Expelliarmus. I added some code to the Expelliarmus' projectile script that detected any nearby objects and added an explosion force to them so they would get knocked away. I neatly and meticulously stacked cylinders on top of each other so that I could shoot them down, only to find that oh, they don't stack, they actually only have capsule colliders, so stacking them how I had intended would never have worked. Still, even in their haphazard arrangement, they serve the same purpose. When I shot my Expelliarmus at them, they all fell down. Now I could finally disarm my beautiful assistant, and with that success, I felt like I was a Hogwarts student passing the final test of my Defense Against the Dark Hearts class. The rest of the students are cheering, Yeah, well done Jordan! Professor Snape says, Turn point to.

Ravenclaw, yes, I'm a Ravenclaw. Those BuzzFeed quizzes don't lie. The final touch was to add some sounds to my Expelliarmus. I found a really cool collection of sound effects in another YouTube video, which I've linked below. In the Expelliarmus projectile script, I would play one of the sounds at random in the start method so that a sound effect would play whenever I cast Expelliarmus. I would play a different sound effect out of the four in the on collision method so that you can hear it when the Expelliarmus hits something. The addition of these sound effects really brought the whole thing together, ended up better than I could have hoped. The last thing I thought would be fun to add isn't really a spell, and it only happens once in the movies, but the thought of recreating it was too enticing. In Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, while searching for one of the horcruxes, Hermione accidentally activates the Gemini curse. This curse causes objects to multiply.

endlessly potentially crushing any unsuspecting victims to death. How fun! Before I could work on the code for this curse, I needed some objects to multiply. I wanted to use valuable-looking treasure-type stuff, just like in the scene in the movie. So, I went back to the Unity Asset Store where I found some great-looking golden candlesticks, dishes, and goblets, and a nice table to put them on. I imported these objects into my project and created a nice little display of treasures from them in my scene. Now I can style in my script. I've created a script called Gemini Curse and added it to the treasures. In summary, I made it so that nothing would happen until the object was touched. Once touched, a timer of up to five seconds is started. When the timer is almost up, forces are applied to the game object in random directions every frame, causing it to vibrate. Then, once the timer is up, the object is duplicated with the curse already activated, and the timers are reset. I actually impressed myself here. I was

surprised at how similar it was to the movies. I added some sound effects for the vibration and duplication, and my Gemini curse was complete. [Music] It had one small difference compared to the movie, though. Rather than crushing into death, it instead crushed my CPU to death, causing the game to crash. So there we have it, a select few ideas from Harry Potter recreating VR. If I continue with this project, I think it would be cool to add some broomsticks to fly around on and some actual wizard dueling. Something that would be really cool would be if you actually had to say the spell out loud or make the correct wand movement to cast it, but I have no idea where to even begin making it do something like that. I'd love to hear what you think I should add to this project or if you have any other cool things you'd like to see made in VR. Thanks so much for watching. If you enjoyed this video, then Expelliarmus that like button, subscribe to my channel. [Music]

Harry Potter VR - Can I make EXPELLIARMUS in VR!?

Harry Potter VR - Can I make EXPELLIARMUS in VR!?