A discussion about 3D and other realtime generation/simulation of visuals

[elbows]

I would love to see what nkm and evomedia could achieve.

I find comparisons with hollywood difficult because there is so much post-processing and combination of CGI with expensive realworld scenes.

When I look at game engines, even lovely modern ones, it doesnt take long to see where compromises have been made to keep framerate good, its easy to find flaws and there is certainly some skill involved with knowing where you can 'cheat'. eg I think I see quite a lot of mtionblur in certain sorts of XBOX360 games. Machinima always interested me but again when actually trying to do something with, for example, the half-life2 engine, it soon becomes clear how much of the magic is in the assets not the engine.

Mavericks post certainly indicates the complexities of trying to make a VJ tool that does everything. I dont think you should try to build everything into the app, for example modelling is best done in a seperate modeller of choice. As this sort of VJing does not appeal to the masses, there is no point trying to please everyone, even if you gave them all the tools, modelling is not for everyone, though it is possible to imagine a large number of free models available in the future. We already see the humble beginnings of this with things like google's 3d warehouse, we dont know what the norm could be in this regard in 20 years. And I suppose some of my realtime 3D VJ image quality groans were the same as ones I had towards the likes of second life. Ive always been gutted that we can blow eachother up online in quite good quality, but everything else seems a way behind.

Anyways, inspiring performers, creators and developers via examples is a very good idea. As the mind boggles at the effort required to get everything right, perhaps focus on a few limited areas to start with? eg do something that has real nice materials, textures, lighting and maybe a nice fake depth of field thing, and Im sure that would be enough to open a few eyes.

Personally Im not good enough with 3D to be much help in this effort, but I am tempted to use one of the 3D engines that requires only limited programming and has reasonable editing & importing features, to try to get a few demo's made that I am happy with. My main passion is always to see things that correlate strongly with the music, and sometimes simple content works best in this regard, but I do want it to look nice. Im not getting much joy from blender game engine thus far, eg cannot get the depth of field working, and am back to seriously considering Unity 3D pro again. Still I have some reservations about image quality, its not the most sophisticated engine out there but at least it is accessible to me.

One more question: There are a huge number of engines out there. Granted many of them can be ruled out due to lack of development, features, license or cost, but that does not completely explain why developers so often start from scratch. Is this more easily explained by factors such as the developers wanting to program on a lower level, because thats what they are comfortable with or they have ideas about how to optimise things? I can see that point, but it does seem a shame when I see open stuff out there that can do skeletal animation and suchlike, go unharnessed.

[AndresC4]

Very intresteed thread, but too many topics on the same page.

I habe been using 3dmax for a long long time,,, but since i started school + working on a fuking callcenter + vjing i have less time for such 3 days modeling, and because im focusing in vjing now, 3d animations are more time demanding, time its money, and vjs dont get much money,,, so basicaly i thing this is the reason why i lost my intrested in the 3d world ( at least for vjing )

On 2007 i saw max/msp for the firs time, and looking for something similar i found vvvv. When i found that i can put a 3d object on vvvv i was more that happy, and with basic objects ( BOX! ) and no ligths i was able to make a very good ( probably not "good", but at least "diferent" ) composition that i can play with in realtime acording to the music. (youtube C7xgfDnq1As). Anyone can make that 3dmodel that i did and this simple vvvv patch, maybe for some of you this is very very simple, well it is, but is very diferent from what i see all day from many others vjs.

Originally Posted by nkm

I'd rather see a simple cube with perfect beat synchronization than a full-blown 3D city that looks good but is a mute.

i agree.

Im using vvvv for less than 3 years, and since the 1st time people told me " hey how did you do that of the camera in 3d in realtime ?? "

Yesterday i used vvvv all nigth long, and with a few simple boxes, a few plane + very good draws made by hand i was able to make something new again. I mean,,, when we talk about 3d, its not only the 3d of Crysys, many vjs softwares can handle 3ds files, but all the things that i can do on vvvv + 3d objets its something i didnt find in any other vj app yet.

vjing is like music, you have maannnyy diferent styles, non of them its " the best " they are just diferent. i prefer simple realtime over hi end vray renders.

I would love to have more of the features that you can find on the 3dengins on vvvv, but as it was told before, you cant expect from a free software that its ready to make hudreds of diferent things at the same time, to have to be the same as efective as a game developed from 40 people that only care abouth getting the top of fps on that place with that camera with that model with that texture.

[nkm]

Anyways, inspiring performers, creators and developers via examples is a very good idea. As the mind boggles at the effort required to get everything right, perhaps focus on a few limited areas to start with? eg do something that has real nice materials, textures, lighting and maybe a nice fake depth of field thing, and Im sure that would be enough to open a few eyes.

Yes, I agree with you. Perhaps we could subdivide real-time graphics in several key aspects and pick one of those to focus on. E.g. character animation.

Granted many of them can be ruled out due to lack of development, features, license or cost, but that does not completely explain why developers so often start from scratch.

The problem is that when you try to do something new like this, the requirements are very vague and broad. You don't want to limit yourself a priori by using an engine with a possibly restricting feature set, without any possibilities for extension or modification.
On the other hand, rendering pipelines are pretty flexible nowadays, so using existing technology for specific aspects should not be a limitation per se.

Does anyone know of a good (free) 3D engine?
Ogre3D is on my mind right now.

nkm

[rachat024]

Wow, jaw...your first post is very very great. The animations are very nice and brilliant. Im waiting for more animations from you.

simulation rachat credit

[AndresC4]

Blender engine looks very good an we know that it's working fine with osc. And it's really free. Why not that one ?

[evomedia]

I agree I think the blender games engine feels like a good candidate, especially as it offers people free 3d modelling too.

I think the look achievable in blender is also much more up to date

YouTube - Blender Game

Also though I still think unity has alot of advantages like midi plugins, although not free isn't particularly expnsive

YouTube - Citroen 2CV Arena - Unity Game Engine

YouTube - Twister in Unity Game Engine

YouTube - Unity Engine playing on the web part 2

Also interestingly cycling 74 has developed some tools to pass data between MAX/MSP / jitter through to unity so alot of the audio side is also open for vj purposes

http://createdigitalmusic.com/2009/0...max-jitter-pd/

http://createdigitalmotion.com/2009/...y-game-engine/

YouTube - [myu] Max-Unity Interoperability Toolkit

Few tuts for unity
http://learnunity3d.com/?page_id=3

[evomedia]

Also saw at the bottom of one of the cycling 74 related links a post by vj anomolee and another re immersive envirnments using unty and max/msp

http://createdigitalmusic.com/2009/0...ion-max-unity/

Some interesting things re reactive usage

YouTube - Early Revo:oveR Prototype (a.k.a....

No idea where to start beyond that, It looks like alot of learning for MaxMsp and jitter, maybe someone else has experience designing via MaxMSP/jitter to get stuff like audio analysis and beat detection. Lots of talk here before re jitter etc so maybe someone has some advice. As I wouldn't have a clue on getting useful data out of a live stream. I do however have a copy of unity so maybe I'll try a few bits with just the midi.

The animation side in unity is amazingly easy via c4d and actually uses the c4d file directly. Unity will directly read my timeline info, so I trigger different animations purely by telling unity the desired frame range. Those can then be triggered via standard javascript code. Anyway enough warbling on.

[elbows]

Have you got Unity Indie or Pro? I have a feeling the midi plugin only works with pro, and I saw a post on the forum that suggested the midi plugin wasnt working with Unity 2.5 yet either, but maybe this is fixed now. I read about the max/msp unity link stuff, its interesting but Ive spent years avoiding max and Id rather learn now to make an OSC and midi plugin that works for unity than go down the route of learning max and needing something else running in the background to make it tick.

My boring day job continues to grind me down so Im strongly leaning towards buying Unity Pro and work towards some sort of 3D career. I think I'll contact them now for a 14 day pro trial and will ask about midi at the same time.

[elbows]

As for Blender Game Engine, its got potential and the Blender GUI wasnt as bad as it looked when I started to get into it, and being free and pretty open is a great advantage. But I never have much luck with it personally, and as time is money and Unity3D does some real clever things, I think I should probably spend the money.

I havent checked but its also possible that it doesnt fit the bill for the sort of game engine nkm was talking about, which is more of the 'lots of libraries that a coder can use' as far as I know, eg Ogre3D. Ogre did look interesting but wasnt very accessible to someone like me so I couldnt really evaluate its potential.

evomedia it doesnt sound like you are too interested in the idea of teaming up with a developer, can you confirm if thats the case or have you not thought about that part of this thread yet or something else?

I suppose I am attracted to the idea of using a tool that has a wider userbase because its more likely to stick around, have a bigger team behind it, etc. I dont want to see any developers going on fruitless missions and having dissapointment, but if its an experiment with no expectations then it would be great to see the results, I just know Ive not got the right 3D asset creation skills to be that useful in such a quest or Id volunteer.

[Motionreactor]

elbows, Blender is about to change in a very good way. 2.5 is due out in a month or so and with it will come a completely updated and more friendly UI.