Sorry to let you without any update lately. During the summer I promised myself that I wouldn’t have had any time to be spent in front of my Mac.. Moreover since last Monday I changed my job, moving into the game business at Rovio, the finnish company that developed the most famous iPhone game, Angry Birds! So working there as a game programmer is taking me 99% of the time while I know I should finalize projects such as LiveMesh! and some other else which is on hold. Stay tuned anyways, LiveMesh! 2.0 with texture support should be out very soon!

Akta

Just a small teaser for all of you

Since over 2500 of you have downloaded LiveMesh! 1.0, that really motivated me to proceed fast with the development of version 2 . Right now I’m working on UV data from the OBJ file into OpenGL, the results so far are really promising, check the video! After UV mapping will be done I’m planning to create an interface for the application where you can customize the params in real time (transform data, marker, objects, lights etc..) and finally I got a great idea on how to export animation data in a fast and easy way, no pain at all for you people! However it’s still an idea, I can’t tell how much will work until I start implementing it

Enjoy the video and stay tuned for the next updates

Akta

I just released this small piece of software which I find quite cool.

LiveMesh! is an augmented reality application using Wavefront objects (which Blender can export until version 2.49b) and a pattern to show your 3D model in a live camera stream. How does it work?

Without going too much into details, the software reads frames from the webcam stream and at any step tries to find the pattern in the current frame. If the marker is found, geotric transformations are calculated and the object is drawn according to the pattern position, rotation and scale. The software was written in C, I used the ARToolkit library to detect the pattern and calculate its transformation data, then the drawing part is handled with OpenGL. I wrote a simple obj reader which gets the vertices informations and display them overlaying the video stream.

UPDATE: NOW THE APPLICATION IS AVAILABLE ALSO FOR WINDOWS!

Since this software is going to be used in a funded project, I can’t release the sources right now, but as soon as the project will be over I’ll release them, promise! Of course you can ask me things on how to do this and that, but I can’t release any code, unless you’ll find me a new job!

Enjoy this first version, simple but cool I think! Many people on the web were asking how to use 3D models in augmented reality, here you have now your small piece of software Right now just the mesh is exported, but in version 2 which is already under development, texture and material object data will be exported as well!

So stay tuned and enjoy the video below with LiveMesh! in action!

LiveMesh! Win32 – LiveMesh OSX

Akta

Enjoy and stay tuned, I’ve been studying pretty hard the integration between Blender and OpenGL on how to import the stuff you do in Blender in the most famous graphic programming language. I will post soon a series of tutorial both for desktop (OpenGL) and mobile devices such as Maemo phones and iPhones (OpenGL ES).

This is the outcome of some experiments I’ve been doing lately using C++, Qt and OpenCV, the computer vision library. The goal of this software is rather simple, but handy!

When you launch the .exe a window is shown on your screen. Press start to open the connection to your webcam and start acquiring frames from it. Then drag selections over the webcam window to select the area, when you release the mouse button the software will calculate the selection’s average rgb pixel component and it will show it in the main small window in three separated text fields. So obviously watch out what you select to get right color there (btw the color is shown also on the top left corner of the webcam window)

Why use this small piece of software? Well personally sometimes I wanted to know: which color is my sweater? Or, whoa, I like the color on this book/flower/pen/muffin etc etc, but what could it be? Well now I can find my answer with this software just putting the object in front of the webcam and selecting the region of interest. As I said is a small piece of software, but handy for any kind of graphic app, Blender shaders and materials included!

You can download the software here, it’s in a zip file, unpack it wherever you wish and launch WebCamPalette.exe.

WCP in action!

Yeah, before you start giving me the f%&#&ng MS supporter/developer, I can upload the sources and you can compile them yourselves on your favourite platform, however you need them to have also the OpenCV libraries compiled for the OS on which you are going to run WCP.

I managed to have some good working interaction between OpenCV and Blender to do face tracking, using a simple webcam, in order to control a camera in the BGE.

For those who don’t know what is OpenCV, they will find the answers here. OpenCV is a really powerful library for real-time image processing, so I strongly recommend you people interested in that to have a look at it!

Anyway how does it work this system I developed? There are basically two components:

• The face tracker
• The real-time BGE camera tracking

The face tracker gets frames from the webcam and for each frame checks if there are faces in the image using the pattern file “haarcascade_frontalface_alt.xml”, where the shape is defined by a set of coordinates (a lot as you can see yourself if you open the file!) which defines face’s pattern. Beware that multiple faces can be detected, but if you are using my example they won’t work, you must use just one face. Once the bounding box of the face is found, its center and area is calculated. CenterX and CenterY are used to control the camera position on the X and Z axis, while the area is the Y, so the bigger the closer the camera gets to the center of the scene (a cube). In the .blend file the area is not used because I’m still doing some experiments to get the best usage of that value, but you can try it yourself, just play with it.

The face tracking works really well in almost every light condition, but I recommend to have a plain light and a good color difference between you and the background. I haven’t made yet any screen recording to show you how it works, if somebody wants to do that in the meanwhile and send me the link of the video, I’ll put it in this post.

Note: this example works on Linux/OSX/Windows platforms as long as the webcam is supported by OpenCV. Mine wasn’t so I had to use VideoCapture module for windows. If you are going to run it in OSX/Linux, change the part of code regarding the webcam device initialization and image capture using the OpenCV methods instead of VideoCapture ones and you are ready to go! Basically you just need a PIL image format value that can be passed computed by OpenCV.

You can find both sources and a win32 build that doesn’t need anything installed on your machine, just run it! The python script needs OpenCV installed. Once you install it you will find in the folder a Python26 subfolder with libs and DLLs. Copy them in your Python folder and that’s all, those are the python wrappers for OpenCV.

- Download BlendCV win32 binary

- Download BlendCV sources

Akta

I just decided to release under CC license the bathroom I made in Blender for a project I called “Bathroom project” (obvious name, isn’t it? )

Appliances and objects in the bathroom include textures and materials, so it’s ready to be used in your own works!

You can use everything is in the .blend file for both commercial and non commercial use, enjoy it!

Download the .blend file

I’m proud to announce you that Blender++ v. 1.2, the batch renderer for Blender, has been released today!

Blender++ 1.2

If you don’t know what is Blender++, please check it out here!

What is new in Blender++ 1.2:

- Queue support: now you can submit queues to Blender++ in a special .que file format. Check it in the Blender++ folder to see how is it done!

- Command line: you can now use Blender++ without opening the GUI at all! This means that if you can remotely access to your machine (i.e. with Putty) you can just start your renders using the following sintax:

• queue render: brend95.exe queue_file q 1 t app_folder
• single frame render: brend95.exe blend_file f frame_number t app_folder
• animation render: brend95.exe blend_file a start_frame end_frame t app_folder

Where t is number of threads you want to use (remember that Blender uses from 1 to 8 maximum threads) and app_folder is the path to the blender.exe file. Moreover if you are using the OSX or Linux version just change brend95.exe with “python brend95.py”

- Baked data support: fluids and soft-bodies/cloth baked data is rendered as long as it’s pre-baked in Blender before launching Blender++.

- Threads support: you can decide how many threads Blender will use to render your blend file or queue (max.

- Bug fixes

If you find some bug please report it to me and I’ll be happy to help you out providing a patch

You can download Blender++ 1.2 from sourceforge.

Akta