There are lots of ways to do storyboarding for VR. I've used Quill and AnimVR and those are my favorites, but I want to try something different with The Boogie Woogie - I want to make it interactive within Unity using 2d drawings and a branching narrative tool called Ink. That also means I'll need a 360 background drawing of the environment. Since I hadn't ever tried to make a 360 drawing before, my first tests were simply applying a 2D panoramic drawing to a sphere. This results in the drawings stretching towards the poles where essentially the top and bottom edges of your drawing are pinched to a point. No good.

Since I'd seen 360 images "flattened out" before (called equirectangular), I thought I had to somehow learn how to draw an image in this funky way. I even found a tutorial where someone shows you how to do just that using an equirectanglar grid.

I later found out about cubemaps. These are basically 6 images you'd put on a box that is then wrapped onto a sphere. THIS was the way I had been looking for. Stretching is minimized but it still helps to keep your most important drawings at the center of the front/back/left/right squares. You also still have to be aware of objects changing direction at the seams, but using this grid as a lower layer in Photoshop helps.

Armed with this technique, I could now make a rough background environment layer.

Next I looked at my story and dialog to determine what expressions I'd need for my turtle and shark. Then I went back to Photoshop and made those.

I then made around 70 storyboard panels for each beat in the story as layers, exported them as individual images, and imported them into Unity.

In my next post I'll go over the process of making them interactive and timing them out.