Javascript 3D table and tablecloth - html5-canvas

How would you do a mesh/plane (representing a tablecloth) that falls on top of a smaller cube (representing a restaurant table), so that when the tablecloth is in place its edges would hang and fold realistically over the table. It would be cool to animate this falling with physics and gravity so it would look really neat and real. I also would like to use a tileable texture (tablecloth pattern) for the tablecloth.
I am planning to make this with Three.js, but I guess any other javascript library or tool would be fine as well. At this point even a static render of the scenario would be a great starting point.
Any tips how to approach this? Thanks.

You lucked out -- it's practically done for you. :-)
http://mrdoob.github.com/three.js/examples/webgl_animation_cloth.html

Related

Why does my object "sink into the ground"?

I have a rather simple react-three-fiber setup that includes cannon.js-powered physics. In the scene there is a cup -- which is modelled as a cylinder whose top radius is bigger than the bottom one -- that is placed on a surface.
When I run the code, during the loading screen everything looks fine. But when physics kick in, the cup suddenly "sinks" into the ground. Why is that? I can't make sense of that...
One theory of mine was that the "physics shape" of the cylinder is not identical with the "optical shape" that gets rendered, but even then the movement I observe still doesn't make sense with any reasonable bounding box I can imagine...
Working example: https://codesandbox.io/s/amazing-proskuriakova-4slpq
Physics are finicky and really hard to debug because you're often trying to intuit the effects of an invisible system by its effects on whatever hybrid view you have.
I notice if i bring the mass downn to a more reasonable value, like 5, the object appears to roll around like a sphere or some other shape.. so I think your theory is sound. I don't know off the top of my head what the solution is, but I do know that the only physics engine I "trust" in the js space, except for very simple simulations, is Ammo.js. It's hard to use, but is an emscripten port of a truly amazing AAA quality library. https://threejs.org/examples/?q=phys#physics_ammo_break
I would start by getting a cube and a sphere working.. once you have verified that those work as expected.. ideally using real-ish world scale units, like a 1x1x1 cube, with a mass of 1. Use a texture on the sphere so you know that its rolling like you expect. Once you have verified the simpler primitives work, move onto the more complex geometries.
Best way forward would be to make an issue on the use-cannon GH. That lib and cannon-es are under active maintenance now. Meanwhile, i believe convexpolyhydron can also do it flawlessly, see: https://codesandbox.io/s/r3f-convex-polyhedron-cnm0s

Animating wind in Spritekit?

Is there a way to animate wind for certain game objects?
For example, branches of trees should gently move, like there's a breeze in game. Not gameplay, more like a special background effect.
If it's not possible in code, what would be the best way to create proper sprite images?
I see a few options to actually achieve that Wind Effect.
SKFieldNode, It allows you to actually apply physics effects to nodes. And if you want real tree branches that can move based on the physics, you should combine SKFieldNode with SKPhysicsJoint. When you combine those two you can actually create indepedent Branch Nodes to receive some kind of force to simulate a wind effect. To understand what you can do with SKPhysicsJoint, check out this guide. This solution can get really complex and hard to achieve with superficial understanding of SpriteKit Engine, but you can create an amazing effect using it. Personally, I would not recommend if you have deadlines to attend, physics always get buggy if you lose your grasp on what you are doing, you may invest a lot of time trying to achieve this using physics.
Create different animation of your tree responding to wind movement and control which animation frame you should use at that specif case. I Would highly recommend this one, because you will have control over what is going on with you tree and people that play games don't pay that much attention to what is going on with background, altho is a good thing to think about it from the game experience.
Create your tree textures and change the anchor point to be at the place you want the effect to be more effective and responsive. The farthest the coordinate in the node is from the anchor points coordinate, less effect from your SKAction it will get.
Sorry for my English, is not my native language.

Is there a way to create simple animations "on the fly" in modern OpenGL?

I think this requires a bit of background information:
I have been modding Minecraft for a while now, but I alway wanted to make my own game, so I started digging into the freshly released LWJGL3 to actually get things done. Yes, I know it's a bit ow level and I should use an engine and stuff...indeed, I already tried some engines and they never quite match what I want to do, so I decided I want to tackle the problem at its root.
So far, I kind of understand how to render meshes, move the "camera", etc. and I'm willing to take the learning curve.
But the thing is, at some point all the tutorials start to explain how to load models and create skeletal animations and so on...but I think I do not really want to go that way. A lot of things in working with Minecraft code was awful, but I liked how I could create models and animations from Java code. Sure, it did not look super realistic, but since I'm not great with Blender either, I doubt having "classic" models and animations would help. Anyway, in that code, I could rotate a box around to make a creature look at a player, I could use a sinus function to move legs and arms (or wings, in my case) and that was working, since Minecraft used immediate mode and Java could directly tell the graphics card where to draw each vertex.
So, actual question(s): Is there any good way to make dynamic animations in modern (3.3+) OpenGL? My models would basically be a hierarchy of shapes (boxes or whatever) and I want to be able to rotate them on the fly. But I'm not sure how to organize that. Would I store all the translation/rotation-matrices for each sub-shape? Would that put a hard limit on the amount of sub-shapes a model could have? Did anyone try something like that?
Edit: For clarification, what I did looked something like this:
Create a model: https://github.com/TheOnlySilverClaw/Birdmod/blob/master/src/main/java/silverclaw/birds/client/model/ModelOstrich.java
The model is created as a bunch of boxes in the constructor, the render and setRotationAngles methods set scale and rotations.
You should follow one opengl tutorial in order to understand the basics.
Let me suggest "Learning Modern 3D Graphics Programming", and especially this chapter, where you move one robot arm with multiple joints.
I did a port in java using jogl here, but you can easily port it over lwjgl.
What you are looking for is exactly skeletal animation, the only difference being the fact you do not want to load animations for your bones but want to compute / generate transforms on the fly.
You basically have a hierarchy of bones, and geometry attached to it. It looks like you want to manipulate this geometry "rigidly", so before sending your meshes / transforms to the GPU (the classic way), you want to start by computing the new transforms in model or world space, then send those freshly computed matrices to draw your geometries on the gpu the standard way.
As Sorin said, to compute each transform you simply have to iterate over your hierarchy and accumulate transforms given the transform of the parent bone and your local transform w.r.t the parent.
Yes and no.
You can have your hierarchy of shapes and store a relative transform for each.
For example the "player" whould have a translation to 100,100, 10 (where the player is), and then the "head" subcomponent would have an additional translation of 0,0,5 (just a bit higher on the z axis).
You can store these as matrices (they can encode translation, roation and scaling) and use glPushMatrix and glPop matrix to add and remove a matrix to a stack maintained by openGL.
The draw() function(or whatever you call it) should look something like :
glPushMatrix();
glMultMatrix(my_transform); // You can also just have glTranslate, glRotate or anything else.
// Draw my mesh
for (child : children) { child.draw(); }
glPopMatrix();
This gives you a hierarchical setup so that objects move with their parent. Alternatively you can have a stack in the main memory and do the multiplications yourself (use a library). I think the openGL stack may have a limit (implementation dependent), but if you handle it yourself the only limit is the amount of ram you can use. Once all the matrices are multiplied rendering is done in the same amount of time, that is it doesn't matter for performance how deep a mesh is in the hierarchy.
For actual animations you need to compute the intermediate transformations. For example for a crouch animation you probably want to have a few frames in between so that the camera doesn't just jump to the low position. You can do this with a time based linear interpolation between the start and end positions, but this only covers simple animations and you still have to implement it yourself.
Anything more complicated (i.e. modify the mesh based on the bone links) you would need to implement yourself.

What is the best approach for making large number of 2d rectangles using Three.js

Three.JS noob here trying to do 2d visualization.
I used d3.js to make an interactive visualization involving thousands of nodes (rectangle shaped). Needless to say there were performance issues during animation because Browsers have to create an svg DOM element for every one of those 10 thousand nodes.
I wish to recreate the same visualization using WebGl in order to leverage hardware acceleration.
Now ThreeJS is a library which I have choosen because of its popularity (btw, I did look at PixiJS and its api didn't appeal to me). I am wanting to know what is the best approach to do 2d graphics in three.js.
I tried creating one PlaneGeometry for every rectangle. But it seems that 10 thousand Plane geometries are not the say to go (animation becomes super duper slow).
I am probably missing something. I just need to know what is the best primitive way to create 2d rectangles and still identify them uniquely so that I can interact with them once drawn.
Thanks for any help.
EDIT: Would you guys suggest to use another library by any chance?
I think you're on the right track with looking at WebGL, but depending on what you're doing in your visualization you might need to get closer to the metal than "out of the box" threejs.
I recommend taking a look at GLSL and taking a look at how you can implement your visualization using vertex and fragment shaders. You can still use threejs for a lot of the WebGL plumbing.
The reason you'll probably need to get directly into GLSL shader work is because you want to take most of the poly manipulation logic out of javascript, at least as much as is possible. Any time you ask js to do a tight loop over tens of thousands of polys to update position, etc... you are going to struggle with CPU usage.
It is going to be much more performant to have js pass in data parameters to your shaders and let the vertex manipulation happen there.
Take a look here: http://www.html5rocks.com/en/tutorials/webgl/shaders/ for a nice shader tutorial.

Need help with circle collision and rotation? - Game Physics

Ok so I have bunch of balls:
What I'm trying to figure out is how to make these circles:
Rotate based on the surfaces they are touching
Fix collision penetration when dealing with multiple touching objects.
EDIT: This is what I mean by rotation
Ball 0 will rotate anti-clockwise as it's leaning on Ball 3
Ball 5 will rotate clockwise as it's leaning on Ball 0
Even though solutions to this are universal, just for the record I'm using Javascript and SVG, and would prefer implementing this myself rather than using a library.
Help would be very much appreciated. Thanks! :)
Here are a few links I think would help you out on your quest:
Box2D
Advanced Character Physics
Javascript Ball Simulation
Box2D has what your looking for, and its open source I believe. You can download the files and see how they do what they do in order to achieve your effect.
Let me know if this helps, trying to get better at answering questions on here. :)
EDIT:
So I went ahead and thought this out just a bit more to give some insight as far as how I would approach it. Take a look at the image below:
Basically, compare the angles on a grid, if the ball is falling +30 degrees compared to the ball it falls on then rotate the ball positively. If its falling -30 degrees compared to the ball it fall on then rotate the ball negatively. Im not saying this is the correct solution, but just thinking about it, this is the way I would approach the problem off the bat.
From a physics standpoint it sounds like you want to conserve both linear and angular momentum.
As a starting point, you'll want establish ODE matrices that model both and then perform some linear algebra to solve them. I personally would use Numpy/Scipy (probably using a sparse array) for that solution. But there are many approaches (sympy comes to mind). What modules do you want to use?
You'll want to familiarize yourself with coefficient of restitution and coefficient of friction and decide if you want to conserve kinetic energy too. (do you want/care if they keep bouncing and rolling around forever?) (you'll probably need energy matrices as well)
You'll be solving these matrices every timestep all the while checking the condition that no two ball centers are closer than the sum of the two radii. (..and if they do, you adjust the momentum and energy terms for a post-collision condition)
This is just the barest of beginnings to a big project. Can I ask why you want to do this from scratch?
I would recommend checking out game physics simulation books and articles. See O'Reilly's Physics for Game Developers and the Gamasutra website, for example.

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