I am using Unity3D, and I have a function which is being called inside of OnGUI to lay out the various gui components of my application. Ordinarily, the labels and buttons are all inside of a certain Rect that I supply, which is centered on the screen.
No problem there... however, what I want to is sometime render the exact same gui elements, which can be dynamic, and thus not just put into a prefabbed texture, into a trapezoid-shaped area off to the side, looking as if that gui were actually on a flat plane, pushed away from the center of the screen, and rotated slightly. All gui buttons that were drawn in the function should still respond normally.
I was rather hoping I could just specify some values in GUI.matrix to map the rectangle to a trapezoid, but my initial exploration seems to show that the gui elements don't appear to use homogenous coordinates, and everything still shows up as rectangular.
Is there any way to do this with Unity, ideally without requiring access to pro-only features?
Since now Unity3D GUI system isn't very flexible. The new GUI system is one of the features still not released in Unity 4 (we are all waiting for it).
From my point of view it has several problems, particularly:
You are forced to layout components using the flow of the code, instead of having a more declarative (or at least a more structured) way to do that.
It's quite inefficient (at least one draw call for button).
It isn't flexible at all. Add, Remove, Enable/Disable buttons can be come quick a painful operation when the number of buttons increase.
however, what I want to is sometime render the exact same gui
elements, which can be dynamic, and thus not just put into a prefabbed
texture, into a trapezoid-shaped area off to the side, looking as if
that gui were actually on a flat plane, pushed away from the center of
the screen, and rotated slightly. All gui buttons that were drawn in
the function should still respond normally.
This is quite hard if not impossible to obtain using Unity's GUI classes.
I see 2 possibilities:
Don't use GUI classes to do that. If your GUI is simple enough, you can implement your own (even 3d) buttons using for example:
A mesh (a plane or a trapezoid mesh) with a texture for the button background
TextMesh for drawing 3D text
RayCasting to check if a button has been pressed
Use a library that implements a more advanced GUI system like NGUI
When I ran into the same problem, I just used normal 3D GameObjects cubes with textures and called OnMouseDown(PC/Mac) or RayCasting(Android/iOS) on them. I guess that's how everyone does it.
Related
I'm trying to make a menu screen in which all the UI elements (buttons, text...) are completely dark and by touching the screen you create a fire (or just an area light) that makes the UI elements visible.
Sort of like this
I read that the default shader for the UI elements isn't affected by light, but i can't seem to change it.
How do I go about doing this?
The UI elements by default use a unlit shader and are also rendered directly to clip space. so you'll need to do two things, first put a lit shader onto the elements, the unity standard shader should do fine, then you should change the canvas render mode to world space. with the canvas in world space you can move it around like it was a sprite. i would also recommend creating a second higher priority camera for the UI with culling turned off. with the canvas in view of the UI camera, you should be able to place a light source near it and see the resulting lighting on the UI.
I'm developing a game with THREEjs and webvr-boilerplate. I'm struggling a bit with how to properly render a HUD (score, distance, powerups etc) that always stays at the top of the scene. I've tried to have a plane (with a texture that's brought in from a hidden canvas element) but positioning it in space proves difficult since I can't match the right depth.
Any clues please? :)
Well, you shouldn't have a classic HUD, VR doesn't work like that.
You're searching for something called diegetic or spatial UI - that is the scores and other icons are rendered as geometry in scene space in a fixed position or distance (this one is called spatial UI). For best results, draw the information on some game object mimicking real displays, for example a fuel gauge on the dashboard of a car or visible remaining bullets on a gun (this one is called diegetic UI).
Unity has made a nice page describing these concepts.
I created a performance statistics HUD specifically for WebVR & THREE.js Projects.
https://github.com/Sean-Bradley/StatsVR
While the default setup shows specific information, you can modify it to show custom graphics and other data.
And if you don't believe me, just check out the
StatVR video tutorial.
I have a cupboard with 9 boxes. On one of them I have animation, which open / close box. It is only change X coordinate of the box, but I can't apply this animation to another boxes, because animation will move it to the coordinate of the first box.
In the debug mode parameter Keep Original Position XZ are disabled. Can't understand, what is wrong.
Should I create 9 similar animations for 9 boxes?
I know that it is possible to animate stuffs using relative positions on the UI when using the anchors, but there does not seem to be any clean solution for 3D objects... This post offers what seem to be the "best" solution for now (it uses an empty parent transform to move the animated object correctly...)
You should be able to apply the animation to any object. I would recommend making a prefab of the "box" with the animation attached, then using the prefab for each. Honestly I don't have much experience with animations of 3D objects, but even my 2D animations are in a 3D space, and each object animates properly with the same animations individually regardless of their location.
Using OpenGL and GLUT, I want to render a scene from two different viewpoints. For the first viewpoint, it is a standard perspective projection using shaders. For the second viewpoint, it is a visualisation of the depth buffer. I want these two images to be contained within the same window, side-by-side.
So far, I have been using GLUT for display. For example, I use:
glutInitWindowSize(1000, 1000);
glutInitWindowPosition(500, 200);
glutCreateWindow("OpenGL Test");
This will draw my scene across the entire window for the one viewport which I have defined. But can I use GLUT to draw two different images from two different viewports, as described above? Or perhaps this is not so easy with just GLUT, and I will need to create a window natively in my operating system (I am using Ubuntu), and then define two different areas in that window which I should draw upon...
Thank you!
GLUT ultimately has nothing to do with it. It creates and manages a window. What you do within that window is entirely up to you.
What you need to do is use the viewport transform. Because the viewport happens after clipping, no primitives outside of the range of the viewport transform will be rendered to (by drawing commands. Buffer clearing will still clear the whole framebuffer). This effectively defines the region of the window that all vertices will lie within.
So you call glViewport, specifying half of the window. Then you render the stuff you want in that half. Then you call glViewport to specify the other half. Then you render the stuff you want there. And then you're done; just swap buffers.
However, this also means that the typical tactic of only calling glViewport in your GLUT resize callback will not work. You must store the window's current size, then use that in your display function.
Two ways you can do this:
You can create a new window with glutCreateWindow(). Note that this will have a different OpenGL context. Also note that it has a return value, an integer.
You can select part of the window using glViewport(), and then call glViewport() again to draw into a different part of the same window.
There is always the option of rendering your two views into a single texture, and then simply making a screen size quad and rendering that texture onto your quad.
I'm not sure its going to satisfy all your needs, but from a visual perspective this should give you the same result.
I am making a GUI in OpenGL (more specifically lwjgl). I have tried hard to research different ways of doing this but I am having a hard time finding exactly what I want. I do not want to use any external libraries (only ones built in OpenGL, even trying to stay away from using GLUT) and I would like to have it work on anything that supports OpenGL (ex. Frame Buffer Objects don't work on older graphic cards).
I am making a 3D GUI with a scrollable panel as a component. The problem is I don't know how to draw a partial GUI component without doing a lot of calculations to only render part of it. I am making the components out of OpenGL primitives, not textures. I was hoping there is an easy way to do this like use multiple viewports. I don't really even understand what viewports are.
In short: I need to have a scrollable panel as a component overlapping other GUI components (since it will be a drop down menu) and not let any of the components in my panel draw outside my panel.
If you just want to prevent drawing pixels that are outside of a rectangular region (and I think that's what you're asking), than glScissor is exactly what you're looking for.
In lwjgl, you can find the function in org.lwjgl.opengl.GL11.
If you want to scroll a larger scene within a fixed region on the screen, the most straightforward way to go is by just modifying your projection matrix for the scroll position and redrawing the scene. If you are using gluPerspective to set up your projection matrix you'll have to convert it to a direct call to glFrustum; if you're using glOrtho it's much more straightforward.
Keep in mind that "scrolling" a perspective view has no one right way to do things - it depends on what sort of effect you want to achieve, and what particular sort of distortion you want near the edges of the overall viewport.