CubeCraft

Inspiration

Creating 3D content is hard. Most tools for this are for super-users and need days or weeks of practice to create simple shapes.

What it does

CubeCraft helps you quickly get started creating and sharing 3D shapes, using an intuitive painting interface and a collaborative experience.

You can be multiple people in the same session, exploring and sharing your creations. And creating new collaborative paintings!

All Cubes can be saved and exported to the GLTF format, and easily opened in the Windows 3D Viewer for sharing, and also used in other 3D usages, such as in Unity 3D or Unreal for quick creation of assets!

How we built it

CubeCraft is built from the ground up within the Hackathon period. No code, assets or experience with StereoKit existed before the hackathon was announced.

We have built all code ourselves, all assets including sounds and 3D models ourselves, unless otherwise noted.

Challenges we ran into

This was one of the most smooth development processes we have encountered, for deploying a complex app to three different device types. Most of the StereoKit code helped us along the way, and extending functionality was rarely needed.

Building for three different devices caused us some troubles, and the final version still cannot build Release builds for UWP without strange compilation issues. Mostly these are platform specific issues, and probably solutions exists if given more time.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

This is a really fun and engaging VR experience, fitting all audiences and ages. It creates a welcoming environment.

The technical side of the app is impressive in most eyes. The integration of netcode for shared sessions, exporting the models to 3D GLTF and saving the 3D models to disk in an intuitive way are all great technical achievements for such a small time spent creating the app. We built the app in our spare time, so we had to prioritize pace 🚀

What we learned

We learned a lot about the StereoKit workflow, and how it has a nice solution for almost all the problems we have encountered.

The fast iteration times with the dotnet-desktop builds, compared with the relatively frictionless asset system made for a great base, where we thught we were able to approach the very technical implementations such as sharing.

What's next for CubeCraft

We believe this could become a great application for both painting fun stuff, and also for prototyping 3D models for games, 3D printing or or similar! The current experience shows all potential, but does not include stuff such as connection system, a better model sharing experience and similar. All this should be relatively easy to add!