I was wondering if anyone knew of a program that can take a 3D drawing of an object and then convert it into the required OpenGL points and normals.
Basically I have an AutoCAD drawing of that I want to be able to display in a program I am creating for iPhone. Any suggestions?
If you have AutoCAD itself, you could export the object into a mesh format, like STL. Reading STL files is straightforward.
If you don't have AutoCAD you may also try FreeCAD, which is based on OpenCascade, which exports quite nice meshes (also into STL format). However the AutoCAD file format is in constant flux, so YMMV when reading the original file.
This is gonna be a bit of a downer, but DWG file formats explore a deep dark road I'm not sure even AutoDesk has control over. The format doesn't even belong to them (they bought it a while ago) and even if you could manage it, the format is updated every 3 years or so (and is set to update again soon). For now, they have all the power. Sorry.
All I can say, is explore the references and take a look here (no code, sorry)
Related
I want to load an illustrator file in my game. Unity should recognize different layers, colors, and forms, and layers with text and display them in a 2d canvas.
The goal is that the players can click on different forms and that unity recognize them as individual forms. Do you know any unity asset or a way to make this possible?
For example when you import an image like this as an illustrator file -> https://www.mandala-bilder.de/mandala/erwachsenemandalas/mandala-ideen-erwachsene.pdf
I thought about an SVG file but then I can´t use the different layers.
Illustrator has a proprietary file format, it has no publicly available documentation for newer versions. While you can dig out old specifications (this is why some programs only support AI files saved in ancient versions) http://www.idea2ic.com/File_Formats/Adobe%20Illustrator%20File%20Format.pdf I do not think you can just go in and start supporting a 2021 variant without requesting (and motivating) the spec from Adobe. They might also want to charge you for it.
SVG on the other hand is free and it's spec is public so there is much widely spread support. also SVG supports groups which can get your around the need for layers
Vector Express is a free conversion API you should be able to use. (requires a network connection, though)
https://github.com/smidyo/vectorexpress-api
You should be able to POST a request (https://docs.unity3d.com/ScriptReference/Networking.UnityWebRequest.Post.html) to this endpoint, with the raw AI file as the body:
POST https://vector.express/api/v2/public/convert/ai/gs/pdf/psd2svg/svg/
This will return a JSON object with a link to an SVG file that you can then download and display.
I am making a game that procedurally generates a level and sets tiles via Tilemap.SetTile().
I've been reading and watching tutorials about saving in unity and from what I understand I need to serialize data so it can be saved in a binary file. However, I don't even know where the data about the tiles in the tilemap is being saved.
How could I make this system - where can I find information about stored tiles in a tilemap?
Is there perhaps an already finished saving system that supports Unity tilemaps on the Asset Store?
As already mentioned in a comment, the "serialization" in Unity is absolutely garbage - completely forget about it.
All you do is save the info, probably as JSON, just a text file.
Note that the Json helpers built in to Unity are completely perfect - very easy to use.
Here's a simple and famous example ... https://stackoverflow.com/a/40097623/294884
(Note that you don't literally have to use Json, you can use any simple text format, but Json is so easy you may as well use it.)
There are actually dozens of QA on this site where someone asks "I want to save _ _ _ in Unity, how do I use serialization?" in every single casethe answer is just "Unity serialization is a joke, just save as a text file."
I was wondering what the easiest way to make a .psd file from within an iPhone app. I am making an app just like the Layers app, and I can't fiure out how he makes and edits .psd files.
Writing a psd parser yourself is a futile business. See the super-famous quote from here (original source code)
// At this point, I'd like to take a moment to speak to you about the Adobe PSD format.
// PSD is not a good format. PSD is not even a bad format. Calling it such would be an
// insult to other bad formats, such as PCX or JPEG. No, PSD is an abysmal format. Having
// worked on this code for several weeks now, my hate for PSD has grown to a raging fire
// that burns with the fierce passion of a million suns.
It goes on and on. So, look for an (open-source) psd reading/writing library.
I'm the author of the Layers app the OP mentioned. Unfortunately, coneybeare is right - I pretty much wrote an objective-c implementation from scratch. The trick turned out to be basing it off a very old version of the PSD spec, from before it got insanely polluted with crap. Layers actually writes Photoshop 3 files.
UPDATE: I've published the PSDWriter from Layers on github. You can use it to write PSD files from a set of UIImages on iOS or Mac OS X: https://github.com/bengotow/PSDWriter
Enjoy!
Checkout ImageMagick. There's an iOS compiled binary that you can link into your application. Or if you want, you can set up the compilation business yourself.
They probably looked up the spec for the psd format, then figured out how to write it manually.
I am trying to create an iPhone game with fairly large levels. Hard coding the platforms and physics objects is very time consuming. I have seen some people have made their own parsers for svg files to use in box2D, and Riq is selling levelSVG but it is a little pricey for me at the moment, and I only need basic features. Is there a tutorial on how to code a parser available online?
Have you taken a look at SVGQuartzRenderer? It is designed to render SVG files in Quartz, so I imagine you might be able to pull out the SVG parsing code from this. It's opensource, MIT license.
I don't know about any tutorials but its fairly easy to do this using an XML parsing library. In my project I use MiniDOM to load an svg file and then I convert the elements into objects in the box2d word. The only thing that I had to do manually was the parsing of the path element.
I've written an extensive tutorial on how to parse SVG files using Apache Batik SVG library. Included with the tutorial are a set of classes and a function I wrote in Java which will generate a set of Vec2 points given the location of the SVG file. If you're using Objective C you could try to port the scripts or at least get an idea of the process involved. The scripts support multiple paths per SVG file, transformations, straight lines and quadratic splines. The first tutorial in the series can be found here.
Alright, what I need is a command-line application that allows you to take a screenshot of a file's audio stream.
For example it should be run like this:
app.exe "C:/artist-title.mp3" "C:/mp3Stream.jpg"
app.exe "C:/artist-title.wav" "C:/wavStream.jpg"
It only has to be able to capture mp3 streams, other streams are a bonus.
Preferably all audio channels are listed in the image, but if all channels are combined into one mono stream it would work just as good for me.
So, is there such a application out there? So that I don't re-invent the wheel.
If not does anyone have tips on how I should go about writing such a application myself? Preferably in Java. I can handle programming pretty well but I'm not exactly an expert on the MP3/WAV formats.
Why do I need it...? Well, it's more fun to link to a file online with some sort of preview image besides the link. It gives you a hint of the audio character before you listen to it (is it loud? does it look like "bit music"? does it have any parts that are more quiet than others? etc).
Never mind, I wrote my own little application in Java.
It was a piece of cake once I found this excellent guide:
http://codeidol.com/java/swing/Audio/Build-an-Audio-Waveform-Display/
Although you can't download the source from that page (as far as I can tell, though he makes it apparent that you should be able to) he does provide some very useful key lines of code that makes it easy to puzzle together the application.
Adding a little bit of help (easy stuff). You can get a graphics object from doing so:
BufferedImage img = new BufferedImage(500, 100, BufferedImage.TYPE_INT_RGB);
Graphics2D gfx = (Graphics2D) img.getGraphics();
And once you have drawn everything you need on the gfx you can save it to disk just by one line:
ImageIO.write(img, "jpg", new File("waveform.png"));
It's hard to get it to look very good though. Doesn't look as nice as for example Audacity. Guess they have spent more time on it than a few hours though.
The biggest pain about this is however that Java don't support MP3 import. They really should get around to that.
So to get the waveform of MP3s I first convert them into WAV using "javazoom.jl.decoder.Decoder.java", it's on their website. Very easy to use, just give the input path and the output path and it's done.
javazoom dot net (couldn't post more than one "hyperlink" on this website)
The big downside of this is of course that a huuge WAV file has to be created, and woe be unto thee if the MP3 happens to be 15 minutes or so... The WAV will be over 100 MiB (maybe even 200 MiB, haven't found out since I got a Java-out-of-memory-error, even though I gave the VM 512mb).
MP3 support in Java today please. Guess the reason they don't have it is because of copyright issues. Copyright really is slowing man down.
Also take a look at http://www.jsresources.org/
It provides a pretty good FAQ section about everything Audio in Java, and some example applications.