I'm learning up on RealityKit and trying to create a city landscape.
Watched this video from Apple and downloaded the associated project talking about RealityComposer
https://developer.apple.com/videos/play/wwdc2019/605
My initial goal is to create a city street with tall buildings and a controllable character which can walk around the streets and perform tasks (character controlled by the user)
I've played with RealityComposer but it doesn't seem like the tool for creating complex landscapes or characters for this use case (I could be wrong). seems more of a prototype tool for fast POC
I'm assuming that there are tools such as sketch and open usdz files (tried googling and searching but nothing substantial came up)
What is the appropriate workflow for this type of app (game) development?
I would recommend one of two options:
A. Programmatically add and control models within the AR View. This will require a decent knowledge of Swift and a lot of looking around for examples and reading the docs for RealityKit.
B. Switch over to Unity. Unity would be a lot easier to work with and is designed for games (Which is what it sounds like you want to do). Bonus is your game/app will be cross platform.
Related
Looking for points/advice re using Flame (Flutter library) for a point & click 2D adventure game. So mainly different rooms with images, tap listeners, some minimal animations. So no physics or "real time" stuff.
Q1 - Which of the flame starting points would be recommended re "game.dart" vs "base_game.dart"?
Q2 - Any other tips/guidance for this? (e.g. dont' bother using flame just use flutter?)
This is a very wide question for the StackOverflow format, but since I'm one of the developers of Flame I'll try to respond as well as I can.
Q1:
Definitely go with BaseGame, if you are using Game you get locked out of a lot of the features of the engine. Game is used if you pretty much only need the game loop.
Make use of the components, they will make your
development process a lot simpler. For examples use SpriteComponent
instead of Sprite directly etc.
There is also a package built on top of Flame that is called Bonfire (not built by the flame-engine team) that you could use too, but that is a more opinionated way for writing an RPG game.
Q2:
You can join our Discord chat and we'll try to answer any questions you have.
Use v1.0.0-rcX, even though it is still rc it is the definitely the way to go if you are starting a new project now, so that you don't have to migrate it later. In a couple of months the final v1.0.0 should be released.
Have a look in the examples directory in the repository, you can get inspiration for how to use most features available in the engine there.
tl;dr;
How a software developer who get's a very high detailed 3D model, quickly & easily optimize it for mobile apps, so he can focus his time & energy on developing the app logic?
I think it's a pretty common use case and there may be a tool for this already out somewhere.
Long story
I have a 3D model (collada) of a machine. This model being created by the machine's engineering team, contains a lot of minute details essential in creating the machine hardware.
Now, I am developing a mobile app with unity that needs to render this machine along with 10 other machines in a single scene. The thing I like about the available models is that they look exactly like the real stuff. At the same time, I am not interested in the internal stuff, the external shell is just enough for me. I have no interaction with the 3D modelling team (let's assume I downloaded the model from some archive), and hence can't ask them to make any changes for me. The model is all I have. I am on my own.
There are two problems I am facing
How to get rid of the interiors of the models?
How to get rid of the high resolutions details in the external shell which the human eye can't detect in a mobile phone?
To give a sense of the scale, the real equipment and hence the model can be as big as 100 ft. (30 m.) while these will never occupy more than a 5 inch HD display. The size of the models ranges from 50MB to 400MB. The entire scene hence can go up to 2GB. Each model has nearly 300k faces.
The other challenge I am facing is that I am a software developer familiar with code and my familiarity with 3D modelling tools is very limited and I would like it to be that way :) I can play around with these tools, but I don't want to start spending half my time with these tools.
I have tried blender's decimate modifier. But the result's aren't good, the amount of details lost is very uniform, instead of being targeted to the interiors. I don't want to spend time in going through each mesh and deleting them manually.
Also, for some reason when I import a model that is exported from blender into unity, they look horrible (some faces/polygons that I can see in Blender I don't see them in unity), even with 0 decimation.
I am unable to digest the fact that the manual process is the only way. I feel with today's technology this would be a simple automation. The steps as I see are
Detect polygons that aren't directly reachable from any exterior raycasts. If required, I can define the set (14 may be enough) of points for the raycast's origin, basically camera's locations.
Delete these polygons
Detect polygons with dimensions less than a threshold
Delete these polygons
Blender to unity models can have slight problems if you don't export them the right way. How to do this is out of my field as I am also a developer and personally prefer 3DSMax.
What I would reccomend you to do is do what you don't want to do, it is the easiest way. Select the faces (just drag and select) and then just delete them all (the inside faces that is) you should be able to hide the outer shell if you got a propper 3d program, just google how to do it if it's too complicated for you.
If you want to delete smaller details on the outside, do exactly the same... just select the polys and delete them. I wouldn't reccomend using a build in tool because most of those tend to take the whole object and make it less polys or more polys depending on what tool you use.
In the end next time just try to get in to the program, as a programmer I dislike having to use 3D modelling software as well, but it is part of the job, so put some effort in and just learn the tools. It's less work than it seems.
Edit: As for the tools you are asking for, those do not really exist, you don't normally take a high poly model and change it to a low poly model for a mobile game. Instead you usually get a 3D artist to make a low poly model. The fact you do not have any communication with the team is a bit odd, but so be it. I'd reccomend either getting in touch with them or like I said before, putting the effort in and learning a 3D program, what you are wanting to do literally sounds like just click, drag, select and then press delete to delete some polys you wouldn't see anyways.
-Lars
with vcglib
vcglib may work for you, you can see the sample for simplify a ply 3D file. And it can applyed for many other 3D file format such as stl, obj... As vcglib is a C++ library, you can write a simple to use this library to simplify your stl model. This method work on the OS without X, such as ubuntu server. You can refer to my quesiton Failed to to simplify 3D models with vcglib, Assertion `0' failed on how to use vcglib to simplify a ply 3D file.
with meshlabserver
If you want do the auto simplyfication on OS with X, or windows, or Mac OS, it's much easy, you can refer to the meshlabserver, meshlab is also build on vcglib. You can run such ccommand, where the PLYmesher_script.mlx is the filter file, you can write this file or generate it with meshlab refer here.
meshlabserver -i ./option-0000.ply -o ./meshed.ply -m vc vn -s scripts/PLYmesher_script.mlx
I'm making a simple cocos2d adventure game, but have no clue how to implement any sort of levels. I've searched for tutorials, but can't find any.
Is there anything I can use to figure out levels in cocos2D?
Thanks
There are so many ways to implement levels in a cocos2d game. I think a straightforward way is to:
Modeling your levels first. Decide what should be stored in a level's data model. I think typically you will have at least two kinds of data:
Player data (Run-time generated, e.g. score, character's current location, etc.)
Level data (e.g. what's on the screen in this level, the rule to pass this level, etc.) This data could be either fixed or dynamic. If the levels are designed by developer, like Angry Birds, you can store this part of data in external configuration files and load them on demand; if the levels are dynamically generated according to some rules, then the rules should be stored in the data model.)
Design a general game-play layer which can be initialized according to an instance of the data model above. The layer class controls the presentation of the level, and is responsible for user input handling.
If your levels shares some global data, you can make another shared data model to manage these things (e.g. total score, achievements, player's name, etc.). Create a shared instance of this class and manage the data in it via your game-play layer.
You could also consider more advanced way like using scripts (such as Lua) to implement the levels.
You mentioned not being about to find any tutorials. I agree that finding free online tutorials for cocos2d can be challenging. I ran into the same problem when I started learning it. I recommend grabbing a book on cocos2d such as Learning cocos2d. There is so much to the API that you will have a very hard time creating even a rudimentary game without any tutorials or guidance, unless you have a lot of prior programming experience.
Currently I am trying to create an app for iPhone which is capable of recognizing the objects on an image such as car, bus, building, bridge, human, etc, and label as object name with the help of Internet.
Is there any free service which provide solution to my problem, as object recognition its self a complex algorithm requiring digital image processing, neural networks and all.
Can this can be done via API?
If you want to recognise planar images the current generation of mobile AR SDKs from Metaio, Qualcomm and Layar will allow you to upload images to match against, and perform the matching.
If you want to match freely against a set of 3D objects, e.g. a Toyota Prius or the Empire state, the same techniques might be applied to match against sets of images taken at different rotations, but you might have to choose to match just one object due to limitations on how large an image database you can have with the service, or contact those companies for a custom solution, and it may not work very reliably given the state of the art is to reliably match against planar images.
If you want to recognize general classes (human, car, building), this is a very difficult problem, and I don't know of any solutions anywhere fast enough to operate online (which I assume is a requirement given you want an AR solution - is that a fair assumption?). It's been a few years since I studied CV, but at that time the most promising solution for visual classification was "bag of visual words" approaches - you might try reading up on those.
Take a look at Cortexica. Very useful for this sort of thing.
http://www.cortexica.com/
I haven't done work with mobile AR in a while, but the last time I was working on this stuff I was using Layar and starting to investigate Junaio. Those are oriented toward 3D graphics, not simply text labels, so for your use case you may be better served with OpenCV.
Note that Layar (and I believe Junaio too) works like a web app, where you put the content on your own server and give Layar the URL to link to.
I'm trying to learn OpenGL ES quickly (I know, I know, but these are the pressures that have been thrusted upon me) and I have been read around a fair bit, which lots of success at rendering basic models, some basic lighting and 'some' texturing success too.
But this is CONSTANTLY the point at which all OpenGL ES tutorials end, they never say more of what a real life app may need. So I have a few questions that Im hoping arent too difficult.
How do people get 3d models from their favorite 3d modeling tool into the iPhone/iPad application? I have seen a couple of blog posts where people have written some python scripts for tools like Blender which create .h files that you can use, is this what people seem to do everytime? Or do the "big" tooling suites (3DS, Maya, etc...) have exporting features?
Say I have my model in a nice .h file, all the vertexes, texture points, etc.. are lined up, how to I make my model (say of a basic person) walk? Or to be more general, how do you animate "part" of a model (legs only, turn head, etc...)? Do they need to be a massive mash-up of many different tiny models, or can you pre-bake animations these days "into" models (somehow)
Truely great 3D games for the iPhone are (im sure) unbelievably complex, but how do people (game dev firms) seem to manage that designer/developer workflow? Surely not all the animations, textures, etc... are done programatically.
I hope these are not stupid questions, and in actual fact, my app that Im trying to investigate how to make is really quite simple, just a basic 3D model that I want to be able to pan/tilt around using touch. Has anyone ever done/seen anything like this that I might be able to read up on?
Thanks for any help you can give, I appreciate all types of response big or small :)
Cheers,
Mark
Trying to explain why the answer to this question always will be vague.
OpenGLES is very low level. Its all about pushing triangles to the screen and filling pixels and nothing else basicly.
What you need to create a game is, as you've realised, a lot of code for managing assets, loading objects and worlds, managing animations, textures, sound, maybe network, physics, etc.
These parts is the "game engine".
Development firms have their own preferences. Some buy their game engine, other like to develop their own. Most use some combination of bought tech, open source and inhouse built tech and tools. There are many engines on the market, and everyone have their own opinion on which is best...
Workflow and tools used vary a lot from large firms with strict roles and big budgets to small indie teams of a couple of guys and gals that do whatever is needed to get the game done :-)
For the hobbyist, and indie dev, there are several cheap and open source engines you can use of different maturity, and amount of documentation/support. Same there, you have to look around until you find one you like.
on top of the game engine, you write your game code that uses the game engine (and any other libraries you might need) to create whatever game it is you want to make.
something many people are surprised with when starting OpenGL development is that there's no such thing as a "OpenGL file format" for models, let alone animated ones. (DirectX for example comes with a .x file format supported right away). This is because OpenGL acts somewhat at a lower level. Of course, as tm1rbrt mentioned, there are plenty of libraries available. You can easily create your own file format though if you only need geometry. Things get more complex when you want to take also animation and shading into account. Take a look at Collada for that sort of things.
again, animation can be done in several ways. Characters are often animated with skeletal animation. Have a look at the cal3d library as a starting point for this.
you definitely want to spend some time creating a good pipeline for your content creation. Artist must have a set of tools to create their models and animations and to test them in the game engine. Artist must also be instructed about the limits of the engine, both in terms of polygons and of shading. Sometimes complex custom editors are coded to create levels, worlds, etc. in a way compatible with your specific needs.
Write or use a model loading library. Or use an existing graphics library; this will have routines to load models/textures already.
Animating models is done with bones in the 3d model editor. Graphics library will take care of moving the vertices etc for you.
No, artists create art and programmers create engines.
This is a link to my favourite graphics engine.
Hope that helps