I just got the Meta Quest 3 as my first VR headset, and I found that people were able to make their own custom homes in Blender. Several years ago, I drew a 360° painting in Photoshop and thought this was a perfect opportunity to remodel it in an actual 3D scene. After watching a few Youtube videos and a lot of trial versions, I was able to successfully upload it to my headset with animations and all!
A few notes for others who want to make their own environment in Blender:
- Only the Principled BSDF shader works, or plugging straight into the surface socket of the Material Output node
- Typing a value into the metallic or roughness bar of the BSDF will not do anything when exported, it has to be connected to some color information like a texture or the RGB node. If nothing is connected, it will just show up as a flat-shaded object
- Even if metallic and roughness textures are connected, the Meta Quest will use its own light source and reflection texture ignoring environment textures from your Blender file and cannot be changed
- Generated textures like gradient or noise texture nodes will not be exported, so all material textures will need to be baked
- Regular IK rigs will work, but stretching bones will not be supported. The number of bone constraints will be very limited
- When exporting as a gltf, I couldn’t get it to export the all animations as separate actions without the headset flashing a black screen. You should download SideQuest on the headset and PC before adding anything so you can still delete the corrupted file when connected to the PC. I had to export it in respect to the whole scene time and make sure everything looped correctly
- All the lighting will need to be baked as their own texture, which is only available in Cycles. For some reason after I baked them, they always looked slightly darker than they do in the viewport and the only way I could fix this was to increase the lighting
- Try to keep the number of textures, vertex and bone counts low so the headset won’t take too long to load