So, for a personal project, I'm trying to make an app that helps newcomers get used to the school quickly. And for one section of it, I'm trying to build a 3D Structure, in a shape of my school campus, with lables incidating where the rooms are, so when the using searches for specific rooms, they can easily find it. So, It would be like from one activity, when I click a button, it opens a new activity with a search bar on the top, and the rest of the screen a 3d image people can navigate through. What's a way I can accomplish this?
I know that the structure part can be accomplished with Unity, which I haven't learned but have an idea of what it is, but I don't know how to build the rest of the app with Unity.. So..
You probably want to start with designing the model (structure) in some-kind of modeling program, Maya, 3DS Max, Cinema 4D, Blender, etc... (Personally I recommend using Blender since it's free and open source). Then you would want to export it to some 3D model format, I recommend using .obj since it is very human-readable and easy to parse on your own, but you can use some other format and parse it using a library.
Now comes the more difficult part and it's to render the loaded model onto the screen. This can be accomplished with OpenGL ES or a more highlevel library which can abstract it for you. If you're not familiar with OpenGL ES or OpenGL in general, I wouldn't recommend using it since it may take some time to learn. There are few libraries out there which can render 3D models pretty easily. Now you should probably create some-kind of a controllable camera as well so you can use it to navigate through the model.
This maybe looks like a lot of work but if you already familiar with computer 3D graphics it can ease it up for you.
Well, you can make a 3d model of your school using Blender (which is a free tool, but will almost certainly be a lot of work). Export the model as a mesh which you can insert into your app as an asset or resource. Read the resource and present it using (probably) opengl. This is a SUPER high level view, in actual fact there's quite a lot of work in each stage. Some third party libraries can make it a little easier, but it will still be a big job. I personally like libgdx for abstracting the pain of opengl, but that's just my personal opinion.
It's a big job, but would be super cool .. good luck!
I recommend starting off with building the structure in a program like Blender, Maja or 3ds Max. You can export your projects from those programs to pretty much any game engine and it makes more sense to build things in one of those programs.
Once you're done with that you can choose which engine you want to use to add the search function, if unity or Unreal or whatever but either way you're going to need to make yourself familiar with java or c to add the search function.
I recommend to use blueprints of building if available, it will save you a loads of nerves. Use it as a material texture and place it on a plane polygon to get a good lining helper.
If you do use Unity for development then try Maya for polygonal modeling. At least they are looking similar to each other whereas 3DSMax is always a mind f*cking experience.
Related
I am new to 3d model on android. after reading many topics i decided to use blender as graphical application and min3d as android 3d library.
So i have a few questions :
what is the options that i have selected when exporting the object to be compatible working on mini3d.
how i can motion the object from code (not pre defined motion in graphical application) (3d human model i want to write using min3d like this to move hands up : or something like this).
I will appreciate if there is any other suggestions
I just share some experience and sorry for the bad english.
For the first question, I recommend you to export as .3ds or .obj file when using min3d as your library. Also, just an experience on using this lib, try not to import an object that contains more than 20000 triangle in min3d. In other words, you may import many objects with each obects having less than 20000 triangle. As the object will have a higher chance to be crashed or even some memory overflow situation.
For the second question, the min3d is based on openglES. This is a very simple 3d object display library. If you want to make some animation like moving arm, you need to move every point of arm to a new postion inorder to make it like moving. That means you need to know and calculate every potints of the arm.
In this case, I will suggest you to try other 3d implementation like unity3d which is easier to implement complicated animation of 3d objects. However, if the animation/movement you want is not really complicated, may be you can try export the 3dhuman body in several parts and "combine" them on the scene by min3d. After that, you may move a several part easier.
What would be the best way to do a 2D Avatar Creator without using an game engine (ie. Unity)?
The avatar images will be a basic body and placing different images for the different body parts - head, body, legs, arms, etc. Layer the different images on top of the base image.
Can this be achieved in a regular Android app without using any sort of a game engine? Are there any libraries like this already done?
For a 2D Avatar Creator, using a game engine for a job like that seems overkill (a library might be too much as well).
Coding it from scratch is much simpler than having to deal with a bunch of unnecessary tools that at the end of the day just take space. Also, it is much more efficient, as you only code the bits you need.
Because you want to make this app for android, I'd recommed doing so using the official Android SDK. It includes Eclipse (a very nice IDE as well as the most popular) so no need to worry on what else to download.
This SDK requires you to use Java (If you haven't learned this language yet then do so. It's probably the best and only language you'll need to know).
My thesis is to create an 3D android game. I have installed the 3D softwares like 3DS Max, ZBrush, Blender. I also downloaded Android SDK for Windows and I have Eclipse Juno. But I don't know how to start. Thank you in advance. :)
If you want to write a game, use a game engine.
I would advice against using OpenGL directly if you want to focus
on game mechanics or story. 3D game engines like
Unity or JMonkeyEngine
give you all the tools you need to turn your 3D assets into a game:
Importers for various file formats, a scene graph,
math libraries, and usually tons of example projects that get you
started quickly.
If you want to write a rendering engine, use OpenGL
With OpenGL you can build everything mentioned above yourself: Write
or find importers for your assets, figure out a lighting model, write
a scene graph. If you want to do all that, cool, use OpenGL. But
doing this technical stuff will keep you busy; you will have less time
to make a really great game.
I prefer OpenGL ES for Android. Good performance and easy enough to learn.
It's better to start from basic with opengl and then understand concept of using 3d and then prefer standard tool to use.
I have listed android game engine tool for 2d and 3d. Hope it might help u.
https://stackoverflow.com/questions/17163446/what-is-the-best-2d-game-engine-for-android/17166794#17166794
Start with unity3d which is a game engine, I am not sure but the names that you have posted are used for making 3d models for the game.
Your Thesis? That's pretty broad scope! :)
What I would be looking for, is something with lots of example code (since you say you don't know where to start) and good community involvement (ditto the start thing).
If you only need a single player setting, then I would suggest libGDX as a place that would be a good jumping off platform, as there are lots and lots of step thru tutorials along with lots of example code (and a very up to date wiki on the API), and a pretty good group at helping out with issues.
Since it is open source, you can dig as deep as you want into the inner workings to understand (or be mystified like me) as to how the code is accomplishing whatever task you are looking at. (which might be handy for your thesis)
While it might not be quite as polished as some other commercial 3d development kits, the BadLogic crew has made some very big progress the past few months on the 3d side of the house, along with breaking my JSON code... thanks! :) )
I'm trying my hand at making a platform game and have been thinking about what I would use to design levels.
I was thinking of using a tile palette that would contain the graphic tiles and their properties. And a similar palette that would contain sprites.
This way I could drag and drop tiles/sprites onto a grid and specify property values. This could all be saved to some kind of file that would be read by the game.
Without getting too into the details, is this a sound overall strategy? Is there anything major that I'm forgetting? Or perhaps there's a better method?
This is a rather open-ended question, but I don't think there is anything wrong with your approach. You might have to try a few things to find out what works for you.
When I make platform games I find it useful to be able to edit levels while I'm playing them, by adding in code to the game which allows me to select a graphic tile from a palette and paint it onto the screen. The behaviour is usually linked to the graphic for my games but you could paint behaviour as well. You then need code for your game to save levels as well as load them. Obviously, you would probably want to remove the editor before releasing the game.
I don't know how much experience you have with game dev, but if you're thinking about making a tile-based platform game then your best bet is leveraging existing libraries/tools to avoid "re-inventing the wheel". I highly suggest looking into open source libraries/tools because you can modify them to your liking. I've had some good experience with libgdx and AndEngine in which case both have TMX support which is a file format that can be used in conjunction with Tiled map editor. I personally like libgdx because it has javadoc and very actively developed, and also that it's a framework rather than engine which gives you more flexibility (although more coding in some aspects).
I've been able to import 3D models from Maya into OBJ files, which in turn, are read by my Android app. This model can now be displayed and I can apply transformations on them as well, even on high-polygon count objects, which is nice.
The next step is to figure out if there's any reasonable way to display animation defined within Maya. I really have no clue how to approach this and my initial research on this essentially came up empty.
Has anyone attempted this before? If so, how would this work?
I think it's worth noting that this question has little or nothing to do with Maya. Maya's file formats are proprietary and opaque; you will NOT find a way to directly display them on Android (or anywhere else, come to that). But you can export data from Maya to (basically) any format, which is what you actually want to do.
So, here's the process:
Figure out how you're going to display 3D models and animations on Android
Figure out how to get stuff from Maya into the format your answer from step 1 requires.
There's a lot of ways to do step 1. For sheer ease of use I'd probably go for Unity myself. Basically it's game development tool that can create 3D apps and games that run on Android (and iOS, OSX, Windows, etc.) It's not free - the Android addon costs $400 - but if you're actually planning on doing anything serious with Android, you'll find it worthwhile. With it, it's actually pretty trivial to make a little Android app in Unity that displays an animated model (and a LOT of 3D Android and iOS games are made in Unity). Unity also wants models and animations in FBX format, which is a widely supported interchange format - you'll have no problems getting stuff out of Maya into FBX.
If you've gone with Unity in step 1, then step 2 is trivial: Export your models from Maya as FBXes, and you're done. If you've decided to roll your own Android rendering app, well, good luck. :)
Anyhow, the point is that what you want to do is find a generic solution for rendering animated models on Android, and only then figure out how to get your content out of Maya.
Instead of outputting each individual frame to a separate obj file like spicyweenie suggests, why not export just keyframes to obj files. Implement interpolation in your code in order to fill in the missing frames. If your models are complex, you'll probably want to cache the interpolated models in memory, but at least you don't have to load them all from files too.
Unlike Cody Hatch's answer, I'm interested in this too. This is my theory as to come about animating a model:
Lets say your model has 30 frames. One way would be to export each frame as an individual OBJ model. From there, you can possible make a folder for those 30 OBJs. So now you have 31 files total. If the person hits a button, the trick would be to load each OBJ in order according to the length of time the button (or whatever action) is valid. and if it lasts over 1 second (30 frames), loop back to the beginning.
The only problem with this theory is that it would most-likely be resource and power intensive, not to mention, a space hog if you try to load a lot of things into one scene.