Blender

Continuing to read and watch Blender training information.

Getting a bit distracted by pulling in blender 2.8 build source code. I’m now a bit curious about the internals and may let myself be distracted by that now and again. Certainly planning to see if I can run a local build on Jabberwock…Chaos upstairs has path issues that I’ll need to resolve before I can do much on that front. One of the nicer things about having more than one build-capable machines around.

Unity

Looking at a few things in the immediate future

Get text working. Hover text labels over stars that always face the viewer with at a minimum the name of the star.
Build star gate model(s) in blender and import them into unity and then place gates in the view.
Build a simple information viewing panel in game and support star selection where the information for the selected star shows on the panel.
Build a simple mechanism for saving game and loading games. Need a persistence format for game data.
Look into adding simple feedback sounds to the game. At least a noise when a selection is changed in the star display.

There have been concerns expressed about getting from a point cloud to imported animation data tied to a skeletal model.

I accept that this may not be trivial…particularly tying a set of points in a moving cloud to control points for bones in a skeletal animation.

Collada

It does appear that there are defined interchange formats (I’ll have to look and see if these are supported bu Unity and Blender) that may make this more straightforward. Being able to export the skeleton for an animation and then inhale it into a processing application seems helpful. Being able to tag points in a cloud for consumption by Unity seems even more helpful.

I looked here and got a pointer to collada which appears to be getting developed by Khronos at this point. This appears to be a general purpose, open, XML based standard for interchange of 3D information. There is also an OpenCollada code archive out there…that link appears to be dead…but it is on GitHub and a project home page.

Wikipedia article here.

FBX

Filmbox is a more proprietary option with information at Wikipedia, Blender, More Blender, and AutoDesk (who created it and still owns the format). The AutoDesk link connects to SDK downloads that support C++ and Python manipulation of these files.