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Closed 9 years ago.
I'm about to create an Augmented Reality application which requires to render 3d models with animation. What is the best way/plug-in or software to export a model to old quake (.md2) format?
I want to use popular modelling software like 3Ds MAX, Maya or Blender. I have search all over the internet but I only found some plug-ins which I had difficulty to work with.
Any commercial tool? I need a good support.
Hmmm... my favorite question.
It highly depends on what kind of animation you are willing to export.
3Ds Max
In 3Ds Max there is an awesome plugin called QTip. It only costs a few bucks but it's worth every single penny.
Maya
There is also another export plugin (MD2Export) for Maya. I didn't have much success with it but it's worth trying.
Blender
There are also some scripts written for Blender but none worked for me. But I think Blender 2.46 has a native export for MD2.
Stand-alone Software
Few lightweight applications have a support for export MD2:
fragMOTION: Can import/export variety of formats and has support for MD2 and MD3
MilkShape 3D: Same as fragMOTION but it also has an MD2 viewer which comes handy sometimes.
Quake2 Modeller: It's very old and I didn't try it personally.
NOTE 1: As I said, it highly depends on your animation. If you have Vertex animation then QTip is your golden choice. fragMOTION and MilkShape do not support vertex animation. But if you make Bone animation, you may use the modeling software of your choice and import it to fragMOTION or MilkShape and then export it to MD2.
NOTE 2: I think you can find more information about MD2 here
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I am starting development on a HTML5 game using the canvas. Things are going alright so far, but I have some things I am a little puzzled on, mostly having to do with performance of such game. So instead of me running into a bunch of problem deep down the development process, I would be grateful to find out now.
I have before worked in languages such as OpenGL and learned how important it is to render things in an efficient order, this is something that can give a factor of hundreds better performance than just randomly drawing stuff to the screen switching back and forth between textures/shaders etc. Is this something I should keep in mind with a canvas game, or will things automatically be queued up and rendered in an efficient order?
It is going to be a 2D game, but with quite a few objects on the screen, and most of them dynamically desaturated and changed in brightness (filters). Is performance going to be a serious problem?
What are the alternatives, any javascript game-engine that can help performance? Am I going to get a performance boost by switching to WebGL even though standard canvas has hardware-acceleration?
Yes, you'll get a big performance boost with WebGL.
Consider using the excellent 2D rendering system called Pixi.
It renders sprites to WebGL with a fallback to Canvas.
Or, you can make your own low-level WebGL sprite rendering system using game-shell and gl-modules. gl-now is a good entry point into these modules. You can use them to build your own game engine.
Phaser, is an complete HTML5 game engine that currently has a lot of traction, and uses Pixi under the hood for rendering. A better place than Stackoverflow to look for help about all these issues is http://www.html5gamedevs.com.
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Closed 9 years ago.
I've added a Canvas to my xaml page and drawn some squares on it. Now I want a event that allowes me to to zoom the canvas in and out, making the squares on it bigger and smaller.
I'm guessing I have to loop thru the children of the canvas and do the math magic on them, but how can I detect the user doing a zoom with two fingers? Does not seem to be anything built in?
Does anyone know about a tutorial?
You should check manipulations. They are the representation of multitouch input in .Net, such as zoom, rotation and so on. You will have to work with 3 events :
ManipulationStarted
ManipulationDelta
ManipulationCompleted (used for inertia)
With the ManipulationDelta, you will get a delta that you can use to transform your controls according to user's actions. Here is the MSDN Documentation
You will be interested by the DeltaManipulation.Scale property for your zoom.
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Closed 9 years ago.
I would like to programmatically produce a simple animation video. Don't think "Toy Story" level of animation, think simple stick figures moving around the screen and other very simple lines and dots in black and white only. The point of the video is to explain a complicated scientific concept with a 5 minute video vs. pages and pages of text trying to describe images with words.
What is the best open source framework to make a .mov or .flv file that I can then upload to youtube or vimeo. I could use ImageMagick to write out jpeg after jpeg, and then ffmpeg to turn those jpegs into a .mov file. But is there a better framework out there for simple animation like this? I feel like the ImageMagick to ffmpeg route is going to involve a lot of me writing code from scratch to make a stick figure walk across the screen.
Traditionally people have used Adobe/Macromedia Flash for such problems. These days javascript and HTML5 canvas seem promising and popular.
There are plenty of Open Source Flash like IDEs if you want to go with that.
http://osflash.org/projects
If you want to have some fun I'd actually recommend Processing and going into the javascript direction.
http://processingjs.org/
https://github.com/fjenett/processing-video-js
or many other JS alternatives...
http://www.createjs.com/#!/EaselJS/demos
https://github.com/dkln/canvas_library/
My company is considering creating a interactive advisor(3d) for our customer. I was trying to find appropriate software for 3d modeling of human figure (realistic).
We are taken into consideration two approaches.
First option is to use one of the 3d modeling software for a creating model and the with help of some internal scripting language animate the model. The software should act as rendering server because 3d model should be reacting on user action in some way. Therefore we are considering applications that has some kind of scripting language.
The second option is to use 3d modeling software to create a character and then animate it with OpenSceneGraph.
There is also the hard way: do it all with OpenGL but I do not think it is a right way.
The project is at a very early stage of negotiations but I have to collect some knowledge to realize if its even possible to do that is such way. Therefore I have few questions:
Is it possible to use a software like Cinema 4d/Maya/Blender to animate in real time single character?
Which software would be the best to model a character (price is not an issue, what matter is rendering speed and very good 'realitness'). We are considering Maya, Cinema 4D, Blender or ZBrush, Poser, 3DMax (however last three does not have scripting language as far as I know).
Can OpenSceneGraph can be easily use for animating any character from software listed above?
As you can see the main issue is 3d software and question if it is possible at all :). I appreciate all suggestions.
Thank you in advanced.
The probably best way to do this is using a 3D game engine, like the CryEngine3 (it's free for noncommercial projects) or the Unreal3 engine. Technically you're interested in only the character animation, but you'll need sophisticated material and lighting support in addition for multi layered shaders. Those engines can do it.
3D Modelling programs like you suggested are not optimized for realtime rendering. Although Blender has a game engine built in with quite thorough shader support it may a bit hard to get started with it. But for modelling the character and get a high quality preview it's very well suited.
Is it possible to use a software like Cinema 4d/Maya/Blender to animate in real time single character?
The realtime rendering of each of those programs is meant as preview, not the final product. Blender has the game engine, but this is not optimized for such kind of things.
Which software would be the best to model a character (price is not an issue, what matter is rendering speed and very good 'realitness'). We are considering Maya, Cinema 4D, Blender or ZBrush, Poser, 3DMax (however last three does not have scripting language as far as I know).
Scripting helps you only so much with animating a character. You'll also need tons of reference and pose data from which the animation system can blend together the expression.
Can OpenSceneGraph can be easily use for animating any character from software listed above?
Not really. Use a game engine instead if you want to get this done fast. Take a look at the CryEngine3 gallery. And like said: The SDK is free if this is noncommercial. If the program goes commercial you'll require a licence though.
1.- http://www.thepixelart.com/10-best-real-time-animation-tools/
2.- I use Zbrush with 3D Studio Max. Combining those programs you can model a character really fast
Those 3 you mentioned (Zbrush, 3DMax & Poser) actually have script languages
Zbrush => ZScript
3DMax => MaxScript
Poser => Using Python => http://d3d.sesseler.de/store/tutorial/run_python/RunPython.pdf
3.- No idea on this :)
Luxology Modo is a very good option for your needs.
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Closed 10 years ago.
I'm developing a new site that graphs some operational metrics. As such about a dozen charts/graphs will be displayed on the site. I want to be able to have them dynamically scale down (within reason) based upon the size of the browser.
I'm debating the pros/cons of generating these as one of these options:
SVG. Great for scaling but may have limited support,
HTML5. Clearly a great choice for the future and for FF customers, IE?
PNG. This would
require that I regenerate the PNG
based upon the size of the DIV &c.
Which is the preferable option? I'm leaning towards PNG just for ubiquitous support, but would like to have client-side scaling. What is the best solution given the state of affairs of SVG and HTML5 canvas support in browsers?
I prefer SVG over HTML5 canvas or PNG for charts. Canvas and PNG zoom as bitmaps in Firefox. (Canvas provides a vector API, but it's a drawable bitmaps surface--not a vector store.) SVG zooms as vector graphics in Firefox.
I ofter run with the view zoomed, so I appreciate real vector zooming.
(Canvas makes sense for games that can't handle the perf hit of retained mode graphics.)
You could do worse than explore a new charting library:
http://g.raphaeljs.com/
You won't believe it at first.
Now you can use SVG anywhere
SVG is supported by all modern browsers.
Canvas is supported by all modern browser.
Internet Explorer supports neither.
A partial API for SVG, with fallback mechanism for IE exists in Raphaël (raphaeljs.com)
A partial Canvas-implementation for IE exists in ExCanvas
I'd say say its not a question of "Canvas or SVG", but what high-level library exists that best covers your needs.
The best option would be SVG or HTML5 that will fall back on PNG if the others aren't available.
ExplorerCanvas brings <canvas> support to IE. So, it would be an amalgamation of 1 & 2. The benefit would be that (a) as more browsers add support for <canvas>, you would automatically get the benefits of already supporting it and (b) you would get scaling with browser size.
You can use SVG with a png fallback just using CSS as it is described in this answer: https://stackoverflow.com/a/13575068/418711