real time 3d rendering question

Game Engine Game Engine Support and Discussion
#1

Hello all,

I’m a newbie on this forum as well in the whole Blender scene. I’m am a graduate student from The Netherlands who is working on an exciting graduation project. The project will be an interactive urban projection.

The idea we want to realize is some sort of an 3d interactive experience projected on the wall of a big building. The building consists of several blocks which we want to like they come out of the building.

Something like the movie you see here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3h3D6dCLAeo
Now, We know how to achieve this with 3dsmax or Maya and Pre-render the whole movie. But we want to make this idea interactive. So we have to work with real time 3d rendering. As we found out that Blender has a strong game engine that can render real time, we are wondering if it’s possible to produce our idea with Blender.

Here is a visual of our idea.

http://trouw.medialab.hva.nl/files/2009/10/trouwamsterdam.jpg

So when the user clicks on a certain block on the touchscreen, the projector will project an realtime 3d rendered cube on to the building and it should look like that the specified block is coming out of the building.

We allready tried to project a pre-rendered 3dsmax cube and it looked great! But as 3dsmax can’t render real time, this isn’t going to work out for us.

So our question is: Is it possible to create 3d animated blocks in Blender that are rendered real time? And will it look realistic enough, like the shading, lightning etc.?

Lots of thanks!

Team Urban Screens!

PS. I’m sorry for the some sort of crappy english! Hope you guys will understand it :slight_smile:

#2

Hi, Using GLSL rendering in the game-engine I think can give you good quality for this project.
There are many threads on using GLSL nodes and custom GLSL shaders with blender so I’ll leave that to you to research.

See the famous bathroom demo

If you only use a pointer this is fairly simple,
Otherwise you can use joystick, keyboard or a python extension module - OSC for eg, which was used for this installation http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T776YZ5Q-CE

Either way youll probably want to learn python to move the blocks.
It may be possible with logic bricks only, but you get a lot more control with python. again, look into existing scripts and examples for this.

If you need to get the block locations out of blender into a file or the network, this is a typical python task, you have access to sockets and other networking modules like twisted.

I’d say this project is not especially complicated however sometimes tasks in the BGE are not as easy as they should be (limitations/quirks in logic bricks, API’s etc).
You might consider highering an existing BGE user to work on this if you run into too many problems.

Good luck!

#3

hi

actually, a few friend of mine have acomplished a lot in this field of art.

to check out what they do just use the following link:
video
unfortunately they talk in german, at 0:50 it begins to get interesting, i just wanted to share because i enjoyed painting so much :smiley:

they use a laser to paint on the building, a webcam to get the laser pos and a beamer to project the painted image.
not quite what you want to achieve, but i thought i’d mention that here anyways.

if you want to ask them some questions i guess you could use the page below to find the contact information, or just write me a message i might be able to connect you with them, if you want:
graffitiresearchlab.at

i’ll be in amsterdam next summer, hope to play around with your tool on leidseplein by then :wink:

greetings, good luck and lots of fun
manarius