Hi everybody

After few weeks of night time work I’m happy to announce the release of GlobeKit, an all-in-one solution that provides you full access to the iOS MapKit framework (using Google Maps) for your games!
I strongly believe that location based gaming is gonna get bigger and bigger in the next future, it’s just a matter of finding the killer formula for it. All the newer devices are equipped with GPS, so the user base for it is huge and that’s why I decided to create this plugin which was completely missing for Unity (please correct me if I’m wrong, but I couldn’t find anything at all so far).

So, let’s go to the facts, what can you do with GlobeKit?

- Create Map Views inside your Unity game in a fully customizable way (position, rotation, size, map type, zoom..)

- Travel instantly with one call either to the user location or a specified one.

- Create your custom landmarks on the map and have full control over them.

- Draw as many layers of geometry as you want on top it, thanks to the draw API subset.

- Full access to reverse geocoding. Do you want to know at which address your user is? Now you can with just one call!

- Map to textures and direct geocoding.

Using this plugin is really straightforward, it’s just a matter of one method call to get each of those features, making the integration seamless with your games.

Please find all the other informations here.

This plugin is available on the Asset Store with a promotional launch price of 35$!
The Android version will come in the beginning of the next year for free to all of those who will buy the plugin within the first two weeks from its launch, so you’ll better get it before the price goes up (standard average plugin price ~ 50$).

Despite the outcome of the sales, I must say that I’ve really enjoyed working with it and that I’m gonna use it myself a lot.
Thanks for your attention and I hope to get a nice feedback from you

- Marco

For now enjoy this!

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 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’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

Just a quick post, I spent the whole week-end trying to rip the video about my talk in Amsterdam during the BC 2009 available on the De Balie website ( http://debalie.nl ). So here it is the presentation, hope you enjoy it!

Akta

I’ve not been that active lately because I’m  really busy with work, personal stuff and the Blender Conference (oh yeah, I got my talk accepted and I’ll be there presenting it! ). Today I’m gonna talk about Endorphin and how to import BVH data from it in Blender. Browsing the web I noticed that there are not so many useful info about the workflow, actually I found just a couple of posts on blenderartists.org where somebody had problem with BVH data exported from Endorphin, but nothing more..

Well basically I had the same big problem with which I’ve been playing around the whole weekend. If you export the animation from Endorphin as BVH and import it in Blender, you will notice how the animation plays smoothly and everything looks in place. But if you try to check the rest pose of the armature, you will find out that is a weird pose, actually nonsense. This implies that parenting it to a mesh will give you an non-sense output as well, nor vertex painting will work! Don’t be desperate! Actually there is an easy way to go around it

First step: create your simulation in Endorphin, then export it as BVH

Second step: open Blender, import your BVH file as Empties, not as Armature! Now you will have plenty of empties flying around your 3D view when playing the animation. Now there are two things you can do before importing your character: you can either clean up the empties leaving only the very essential ones that will be used in the IK constrains in your armature or you can leave as they are. This would give a better resolution if your armature has a lot of bones. Personally 10-15 empties were enough for me

Third step: import your character! You need to position it as more precise as possible to the empties. This means that joints and empties have to be in the same place otherwise the animation will not be so nice to see First add two constrains to the armature root, which is usually in the hip. One IK solver and one copy location. Both to the empty which represents the hip in the simulation imported from endorphin. After that for each couple (bone, empty) add just an IK solver to the bone which has as a target the right empty generated from the BVH. Don’t use the tail! And chain length in some parts has to be changed to 1, lower legs and forearms for example, but you need to know something about rigging to do this. I have no time to explain it here right now

Fourth step: tweak and enjoy the final result!

Hope this helped, I’m actually really happy about results I’m getting right now. Oh and I forgot to mention that since all the other contrains, especially IK solvers, were taken in account in the endorphine simulation (for instance knees etc..) you can clear them from the character’s armature.

Here you have the blend file from a quick experiment I made (15 minutes)
Endorphin Blender test
Here it is another experiment I made

Marco

Sources available! Click here to download them!

Akta

Edit: look at what Mike Pan did using BlenderTrack, amazing and brilliant idea. I was actually wondering how to head track using this script, but Mike was faster and smarter than me
Enjoy his video and let’s see what comes next!

• Mobile client, a python script which reads the accelerometer data and sends it via bluetooth to the pc
• A server that runs on your pc and shares the data with the BGE through a local UDP non-blocking socket
• A Blender script which handles the cube rotation in the BGE using the n95 accelerometer’s data

Why did I use a local socket? Sometimes I experienced some lag using pyserial in Blender, so to avoid that my idea was to use a non blocking socket. With this approach I had a smooth game running in Blender without any lag.

What do you need to run this? A Nokia N95, a PC/Laptop with a BT connection and Blender of course! You need to install PyS60 on your Nokia phone from here. Download both PythonForS60_1_4_5_3rdEd.sis and PythonScriptShell_1_4_5_3rdEd_unsigned_testrange.SIS you need to sign the ScriptShell otherwise the accelerometer data won’t be retrieved by the script due to security reasons of Nokia phones. You can sign it from https://www.symbiansigned.com/app/page using “Open signed online”. I’m going to put the source code of what I did really soon, I want to improve a little bit some part of the code to make it more stable. However even though the scenario I present in this video is really simple, it’s a way to show you how Blender is really powerful (besides modeling, animating, composing, whatever ), Python is really one the strongest features that Blender has, since it makes the possibilities of interaction with other apps, device etc,  endless. Try for example to imagine the N95 as a joypad for a Blender game WipeOut style (I personally hate WipeOut, but somebody may love it ).

So enjoy the video and if you have feedbacks, questions, comments, feel free to ask!

Edit: sources available! Click here to download blender95!

Akta