I'm new to OpenGL-ES and looking for the best approach for creating a realistic model of an eye whose pupil can dilate and constrict so I have a plan in mind while running through tutorials.
I've made a mesh in blender that is basically a sphere with a hole (the 'pole' or central vertex is removed and a couple surrounding circle edges).
I plan to add an iris texture directly to the sphere's polys surrounding the hole.
To change pupil size, do I just need a function to reposition the vertices of the hole so the hole dilates or contracts?
I'm going to use OpenGL within an Objective-C app. I have Jeff Lamarche's Objective C export script. Is it standard to export only the mesh from blender, and add textures in code later in xcode? Or is it easier/better to setup the textures on the meshes in blender first and export the more finished product's data to xcode?
Your question is a bit old, so I'm not sure how much progress you've made, but as I've been climbing up the learning curve myself I thought I'd take a shot at answering.
If you want to animate the individual vertices of your model, I believe the method you'll want is Vertex Skinning. I can't speak much on that front as I haven't yet had reason to experiment with it, although it's a technique only available in OpenGL ES 2.0. (Which is probably where you want to start anyway, the increased flexibility over 1.1 is more than worth any additional incline to the learning curve.)
The answer to your texturing question is somewhat mixed. You'll need to actually apply the texture in OpenGL. But what Blender can do for you is determine the texture coordinates. Each vertex of your mesh will have a texture coordinate associated with it. The texture coordinate will be X, Y coordinates which map to a location on the texture image. The coordinates are in a range from 0.0 to 1.0 -- so, since your image texture is a rectangle, the texture coordinate {0, 0} maps to the bottom left corner; {1 , 1} maps to the top right corner; {0.5, 0.5} maps to the exact center of the image.
So in blender, you'd want to go ahead and texture the object with UV mappings. When you export, although your exported mesh won't contain any of the image content, it will retain the texture coordinates which map to your image content. This will allow you to apply the texture in OpenGL so that the texture is applied the same way it appeared in blender.
I've personally had some trouble getting Jeff Lamarche's script to spit out the texture coordinates, as Blender api seems to change significantly with each release. I've had more success with an .obj converter. So I've been exporting from blender to .obj, and using a command line tool to go from .obj to a C header file.
If you encounter similar problems with Lamarche's script, this post might help solve it: http://38leinad.wordpress.com/2012/05/29/blender-2-6-exporting-uv-texture-coordinates/
And this is a good resource for a .obj to .h script:
http://heikobehrens.net/2009/08/27/obj2opengl/
Related
I'm tring to developing a configurator. It's about cups. These should be displayed in 3D. A design should be uploaded. It works by uploading a texture like this.
Otherwise the design will not fit. Is there a way to load a full-size rectangular image as a texture? The Texture may like to be stretched. The texture should not be made cubic by the user, but automatically in the background maybe.. I hope you understand me.
This is the OBJ-File
Your UV mapping looks difficult to apply a texture to. Especially because it has so much empty space, and is skewed in an arc, so you would need to warp all your textures for them to fit nicely.
You should make the UV mapping work for you. Why don't you use the built-in CylinderBufferGeometry class to apply a texture on top of your cup geometry? You could use its attributes to match the side of your cup's shape:
CylinderBufferGeometry(
radiusTop,
radiusBottom,
height,
radialSegments,
heightSegments,
openEnded,
thetaStart,
thetaLength
);
With this approach, you could leave your cup geometry untouched, then apply a "sticker" texture on top of it. It could wrap all the way around the cup if you wanted, or it could be constrained to only the front. You could scale it up, rotate it around, and it would be independent of a baked-in UV mapping done in Blender. Another benefit is that this approach occupies the entire [0, 1] UV range, so you could simply use square textures, and you wouldn't be wasting data with empty space.
Look at this demo to see how you can play with the geometry's configuration.
I am attempting to render a flat, dynamically created heatmap on top of a 3D model that is loaded from an OBJ (or STL).
I am currently loading and rendering an OBJ with Three.js. I have vector3 points that I am currently drawing as simple red cubes (image below). These data points are all raycasted to my OBJs mesh and are lying on the surface. The vector3 points are loaded from an external data source and will change depending on what data is being viewed/collected.
I would like to render my vector3 point data into a heatmap on the surface of my OBJ. Here are some examples illustrating the type of visual effects I am trying to achieve:
I feel like vertex coloring is the method of achieving this, but my issue is that my OBJ model does not have enough tessellation to do this. As you can see many red dots fall on each face. I am struggling to find a way to draw over my object's mesh with colors exactly where my red point data is. I was assuming I would need to convert my random vector3 points into a mesh, but cannot find a method to do so.
I've looked at the possibility of generating a texture, but 1) I do not have a UV map for my OBJs and do not see a way to programmatically generate them and 2) I am a bit lost on how I would correlate vector3 point data to UV points.
I've looked at using shaders, but my vector3 point data appears to be too large for using a shader (could be hundreds of thousands of points). I also feel it is not the right approach to render the heatmap every frame and would rather only render it once on load.
I've looked into isosurfaces with point clouds and the marching cubes algorithm, but I didn't think this was the right direction since only my data is a bit like a point cloud, and I am unsure as to how I would keep this smooth along the surface of my OBJ mesh.
Although I would prefer to keep everything in JavaScript for viewing in the browser, I am open to doing server side processing in any language/program with REST so long as it can be automated without human intervention, and pushed back to the browser for rendering.
Any suggestions or guidance is appreciated.
I'm only guessing but it seems like first you need to have UV coordinates that map every triangle to a texture. Rather than do this by hand I'd suggest using a modeling package. Most modeling packages have some way of automatically and uniformly mapping every triangle to a texture. For example in Blender
Next to put the heatmap in the texture by computing which triangles are affected by each dot (your raycasting), looking up their texture coordinates, projecting that dot into texture space and then putting the colors in that part of the texture. I'm only guessing that you need to not just do exact points but probably need to consider adjacent triangles since some heat info that hits near the edge of a triangle needs to bleed over into the adjacent triangle but that adjacent triangle might be using a completely different part of the texture.
I am curious about the limits of three.js. The following question is asked mainly as a challenge, not because I actually need the specific knowledge/code right away.
Say you have a game/simulation world model around a sphere geometry representing a planet, like the worlds of the game Populous. The resolution of polygons and textures is sufficient to look smooth when the globe fills the view of an ordinary camera. There are animated macroscopic objects on the surface.
The challenge is to project everything from the model to a global map projection on the screen in real time. The choice of projection is yours, but it must be seamless/continuous, and it must be possible for the user to rotate it, placing any point on the planet surface in the center of the screen. (It is not an option to maintain an alternative model of the world only for visualization.)
There are no limits on the number of cameras etc. allowed, but the performance must be expected to be "realtime", say two-figured FPS or more.
I don't expect ayn proof in the form of a running application (although that would be cool), but some explanation as to how it could be done.
My own initial idea is to place a lot of cameras, in fact one for every pixel in the map projection, around the globe, within a Group object that is attached to some kind of orbit controls (with rotation only), but I expect the number of object culling operations to become a huge performance issue. I am sure there must exist more elegant (and faster) solutions. :-)
why not just use a spherical camera-model (think a 360° camera) and virtually put it in the center of the sphere? So this camera would (if it were physically possible) be wrapped all around the sphere, looking toward the center from all directions.
This camera could be implemented in shaders (instead of the regular projection-matrix) and would produce an equirectangular image of the planet-surface (or in fact any other projection you want, like spherical mercator-projection).
As far as I can tell the vertex-shader can implement any projection you want and it doesn't need to represent a camera that is physically possible. It just needs to produce consistent clip-space coordinates for all vertices. Fragment-Shaders for lighting would still need to operate on the original coordinates, normals etc. but that should be achievable. So the vertex-shader would just need compute (x,y,z) => (phi,theta,r) and go on with that.
Occlusion-culling would need to be disabled, but iirc three.js doesn't do that anyway.
I am building quite a complex 3D environment in Three.js (FPS-a-like). For this purpose I wanted to structure the loading of textures and materials in an object oriënted way. For example; materials.wood.brownplank is a reusable material with a certain texture and other properties. Below is a simplified visualisation of the process where models uses materials and materials uses textures.
loadTextures();
loadMaterials();
loadModels();
//start doing stuff in the scene
I want to use that material on differently sized objects. However, in Three.js you can't (AFAIK) set a certain texture scale. You will have to set the repeat to scale it appropiate to your object. But I don't want to do that for every plane of every object I use.
Here is how it looks now
As you can see, the textures are not uniform in size.
Is there an easy way achieve this? So cloning the texture and/or material every time and setting the repeat according to the geometry won't do :)
I hope someone can help me.
Conclusion:
There is no real easy way to do this. I ended up changing my loading methods, where things like materials.wood.brownplank are now for example getMaterial('wood', 'brownplank') In the function new objects are instantiated
You should be able to do this by modifying your geometry UV coordinates according to the "real" dimensions of each face.
In Three.js, UV coordinates are relative to the face and texture (as in, 0.0 = one edge, 1.0 = other edge), no matter what the actual size of texture or face is. But by modifying the UVs in geometry (multiply them by some factor based on face physical size), you can use the same material and texture in different sizes (and orientations) per face.
You just need to figure out the mapping between UVs, geometry scale and your desired working units (eg. mm or m). Sorry I don't have, or know a ready algorithm to do it, but that's the approach you probably need to take. Should be quite doable with a bit of experimentation and google-fu.
Context: trying to take THREE.js and use it to display conic sections.
Method: creating a mesh of vertices and then connect face4's to all of them. Used two faces to produce a front and back side so that when the conic section rotates it won't matter from which angle the camera views it.
Problems encountered: 1. Trying to find a good way to create a intuitive mouse rotation scheme. If you think in spherical coordinates, then it feels like just making up/down change phi and left/right change phi would work. But that requires that you can move the camera. As far as I can tell, there is no way to change actively change the rotation of anything besides the objects. Does anyone know how to change the rotation of the camera or scene? 2. Is there a way to graph functions that is better than creating a mesh? If the mesh has many points then it is too slow, and if the mesh has few points then you cannot easily make out the shape of the conic sections.
Any sort of help would be most excellent.
I'm still starting to learn Three.js, so I'm not sure about the second part of your question.
For the first part, to change the camera, there is a very good way, which could also include zooming and moving the scene: the trackball camera.
For the exact code and how to use it, you can view:
https://github.com/mrdoob/three.js/blob/master/examples/webgl_trackballcamera_earth.html
At the botton of this page (http://mrdoob.com/122/Threejs) you can see the example in action (the globe in the third row from the bottom).
There is an orbit control script for the three.js camera.
I'm not sure if I understand the rotation bit. You do want to rotate an object, but you are correct, the rotation is relative.
When you rotate or move your camera, a matrix is calculated for that position/rotation, and it does indeed rotate the scene while keeping the camera static.
This is irrelevant though, because you work in model/world space, and you position your camera in it, the engine takes care of the rotations under the hood.
What you probably want is to set up an object, hook up your rotation with spherical coordinates, and link your camera as a child to this object. The translation along the cameras Z axis relative to the object should mimic your dolly (zoom is FOV change).
You can rotate the camera by changing its position. See the code I pasted here: https://gamedev.stackexchange.com/questions/79219/three-js-camera-turning-leftside-right
As others are saying OrbitControls.js is an intuitive way for users to manage the camera.
I tackled many of the same issues when building formulatoy.net. I used Morphing Geometries since I found mapping 3d math functions to a UV surface to require v little code and it allowed an easy way to implement different coordinate systems (Cartesian, spherical, cylindrical).
You could use particles instead of a mesh I suppose but a mesh seems best. The lattice material is not too useful if you're trying to understand a surface mathematically. At this point I'm thinking of drawing my own X,Y lines on the surface (or phi, theta lines etc) to better demonstrate cross-sections.
Hope that helps.
You can use trackball controls by which you can zoom in and out of an object,rotate the object,pan it.In trackball controls you are moving the camera around the object.Object still rotates with respect to the screen or renderer centre (0,0,0).