Paul Brunt » Blender

WebGL:Picking in GLGE

admin — Sun, 17 Jan 2010 19:26:52 +0000

Another week past and I’ve been busy adding picking to the list of GLGE’s features. This turned out to be more challanging then I had first thought, mainly due to hours trying to find a stupid mistake I made early on I’ve still got to do some optimization, but it’s reasonable performance at the moment. Hopefully, I’ll be able to use the object culling I’m planing for the scene to speed up the picking as well

see the latest demo over at GLGE

Demo Video Below:

WebGL Spotlights and animation

admin — Sun, 13 Dec 2009 17:19:57 +0000

Another update:

Targets acheived this week:

1) spotlights are now done and dusted

2) made the animation system more generic(the aim is to make everything easy to animate), see the scrolling material layer on the floor of this weeks demo and the movement of the spot lights

3) started writting an XML file format to make things a bit easier when it comes to handling resources

4) fog is on hold until untill I’ve got round to doing some turrain to demo it

See the Latest Demo Here

(Sorry still now video under linux again)

It’s been a very very busy week I’ve nearly doubled the size of the library. I looked into importing collada files and I don’t think

It’s all that practical, for more then basic mesh import. It’s an excellant generic format but it’s highly involved and since the whole

purpose of the library was to abstract away the complexity I’ve decided to try and map a very simple XML format directly to the library.

For example the material for animated floor in the demo is expressed as:

-5.47,0.0,1.0,0.0,8.34,0.0

12.28,1.0,30.22,1.0,36.84,1.0

31.16,0.0,40.0,0.0,46.32,0.0

Github does seem to be the best I’ve checkout so far. I’ve put up some preliminary documentation for anybody intrested Initially docs

Targets acheived this week:

1) Spotlights are now done and dusted

2) Made the animation system more generic (the aim is to make everything easy to animate), see the scrolling material layer on the floor of this weeks demo and the movement of the spot lights

3) Started writting an XML file format to make things a bit easier when it comes to handling resources

4) Fog is on hold until untill I’ve got round to doing some terrain to demo it

The latest demo is up, sorry for the insane animated material but I just wanted to do something to demo the animation system.

See the Latest Demo Here

(Sorry still no video under linux again)

It’s been a very very busy week I’ve nearly doubled the size of the library. I looked into importing collada files and I don’t think It’s all that practical, for more then basic mesh import. It’s an excellant generic format but it’s highly involved and since the whole purpose of the library was to abstract away the complexity I’ve decided to try and map a very simple XML format directly to the library. I may still reconsider and start a collada import but it will be some time off.

I’m starting to think it’s nearly time to release(at least as an alpha, since the api is still changing on a daily basis). I’ve been looking into github(many thanks to Giles Thomas for pointing me that way). Any other suggestions out there? Github does seem to be the best I’ve checkout so far. I’ve also put up some preliminary documentation for anybody intrested.

WebGL Early demo of graphics engine

admin — Fri, 27 Nov 2009 15:41:27 +0000

I’ve started a new graphics engine using webgl it’s still very very early days(pre pre alpha lets say version 0.001), only been working on it a few of weekends) so consider this just a bit of a taster. I’ve now got skeletal animation working reasonably well and I’ve started on the material system. Remember this is only a very basic Work in progress and the graphics engine is nowhere near even beta so I’m not officially releasing that yet. Any feed back on the FPS your getting on your hardware would be much appricated I’m doing my best to keep things fast. Video below and demo links:

http://www.paulbrunt.co.uk/webgl/demo1/

I’ve started working on a new graphics engine using webgl, it’s still very very early days(pre pre alpha lets say version 0.001). I’ve only been working on it a few of weekends, so consider this just a bit of a taster.

I’ve now got skeletal animation working reasonably well and I’ve started on the material system. Remember this is only a very basic work in progress and the graphics engine is nowhere near even beta so I’m not officially releasing that yet. Any feed back on the FPS your getting on your hardware would be much appricated I’m doing my best to keep things fast. Video below and demo links:

View the demo in a webgl enabled browser:

http://www.paulbrunt.co.uk/webgl/demo1/

Or the video on youtube:

Berts Breakdown

admin — Sun, 20 Sep 2009 11:00:52 +0000

As a learning exercise and an attempt to push the latest browsers I decided to create a platform game using the new HTML5 canvas element. Although I did encounter a few minor issues, things generally went quite smoothly and surprisingly quickly. The whole game, graphics and all, only took about 100 hours.

>>Play Berts Breakdown Now<<

I’m sure the game could be faster I can see glaring optimizations that could be made but to be honest it seems to run more than okay on the machines I’ve tested it on, which was a little bit of a shock. Chrome was particularly impressive and was managing an extraordinary 120fps with Firefox 3.5 coming in a not too shabby second at 85fps, admittedly that is on a quad core (though the game only used one) machine with 4 gig of ram etc. But it seemed to be just about playable on a 900MHz eee.

Here is an open question to anyone out there in the game dev world. How do you make tiles effectively? I did the majority of the graphics using blender (with a little tweaking occasionally with the gimp) and extracting tiles from the rendered maps was proving to be very time consuming when doing it manually. So, I did what any programmer would do and wrote a script that attempted to identify unique tiles within the rendered images but it was proving very difficult to automate effectively. In the end I decided to go with the automated method even though it doubled (estimate) the number of tiles required to reproduce the maps. I will have to go back and work on that script at some point; no doubt such a thing will come in useful in future.

I’ve not tried the game with explorer canvas yet but I’m not holding out much hope that it’ll perform at any sort of usable level though I would really like to be surprised. Unfortunately, the game isn’t working on IE without modification (what a surprise). I know IE has improved a lot but it’s still lagging so far behind the other browsers in so many ways, I’m at a complete loss as to why anyone anywhere would run it voluntarily (rant over). Anyway, I’ll see if I can get it working in IE at some point but I’m not going out my way on this one, perhaps the next game.

>>Play Berts Breakdown Now<<

UPDATE: The wonderfull folks over at google have made life so much easier today; Berts breakdown will now work in ie6+ thanks to Google Chrome Frame. Get it from http://code.google.com/chrome/chromeframe/ or simply follow the prompt when you try and play the game.

PS, given this news I’m no longer going to bother adapting for excanvas.

[View with PicLens]

Head Tracking in Blender with OpenCV

Paul — Sat, 07 Mar 2009 17:56:24 +0000

This is a quick experiment using OpenCV in blender, The position of the viewers head is calculated and then the cameras projection matrix is set according. Might be useful script if it didn’t take up so much power(3 cores of a quad core) just to keep it going. I think it needs a lot optimization, then it might be worth integrating into a game.

Waterfall effect in BGE

Paul — Sun, 21 Dec 2008 16:15:57 +0000

Here is a little experiment to produce a waterfall effect in the blender game engine:

I’m not really happy with the ripples in the water, but I think it’ll do for now!

smoke and fire in blender game engine

Paul — Sun, 14 Dec 2008 08:58:50 +0000

Here is my attempt at a smoke sand fire effect in the blender game engine(GLSL) using scrolling UV and nodes.

here is the blend file: Smoke Effect Blend file

Blender Life Contest

Paul — Thu, 30 Oct 2008 13:51:30 +0000

I’ve not posted for a while. But that game idea is now on hold at the moment. I though I’d have a go at entering the “Blender Life” contest over at BlenderArtists instead. It’s coming on quite well and I’ll post the image as they stand ASAP. Although this isn’t my first attempt at a human head, as is probably quite evident by the image of me in the website banner , I’m really going all out this time.

Where I’m at:
Okay so far I’ve done the model and most of the basic texturing(the normal maps still need sort and the skin texture is a little borken). I’ve now started to attempt to achieve some realistic hair, the hardest part in my opinion, still the closing date is quite some ways off yet so I’m sure I’ll put in another few hundred hours yet

Blender Truck Model

Paul — Sat, 13 Sep 2008 10:35:26 +0000

Here is a fully textured model of an army truck. It was originally indented as a game model but the poly count got quite high:

Download Blend File:armytruck1.blend

3D Model of Me

Paul — Tue, 09 Sep 2008 15:55:07 +0000

Here is a 3D model of me. It’s not perfect, eyes are wrong ears are wrong. I didn’t really want to do one of me but people are bad enough when you take a photo, so they aren’t too keen on being modelled in 3D.