Zero Caliber VR review

Zero Caliber VR is a virtual reality simulator, first person shooter where you can fully customise a wide range of weapons ranging from pistols, shotguns, machine guns and snipers. All the attachments can be customisable like putting a sniper scope on a pistol or shotgun. There are a wide range of scopes, lasers, magazines (normal, double and extended) for all the guns and you can even customise the colour of them by spray painting on them. Finding cover in shooting games are a must if you want to live and in zero caliber you have to manually crouch in real live in order to get behind cover in the game.

The game itself has about 7-8 maps but it can take a while to complete each one. Currently at the time of me writing this review, you can play singleplayer or multiplayer PVE. Sadly I can't see any sign of PVP but maybe in the future, Xreal Games, the company behind it might have add it.

This game was made in unreal engine and I did something like it last year, Project Ignite, so how does it stack up against it. The weapons in Zero Caliber VR are more smoother in the way that they are handled, meaning that you have to actually pull the top part of a pistol back after you reload and you have to pump the shotgun everytime you shoot. The action of reloading the weapons is also different for each gun.

My thoughts of Zero Caliber VR are that it's a good concept and I would like to see more games that take the advantage of the hardware like this.

Green screening with Blender

For our animation we used a green screen so that we can act out the action and then use 3d modeling software such as maya and blender to recreate the actions to use in out animations. To separate me from the background I used blender 2.8 since the software I used to edit videos (Hitfilm) didn't have the tools to do it.

So I used blender to remove the green around me and replaced it with alpha. Since the camera captured more than just the green screen there were still stuff at the sides, so to remove that I simply created a mask with the mask tool around the green screen and plugged the channel key (To remove the green) in to a multiply node to remove everything that wasn't in the green screen. As unfortunatly blender isn't the best tool to do this in it took a whole day to render the 7500 frames (@ 25fps, ~5 minutes of video).


To conclude, I think that blender still has room to improve on 2D video rendering as it also rendered the 3D view too even though there wasn't a need to. One good thing about blender's compositor is that it used a node based workflow so it's easy to and and remove effects.

The Mask