Hi vvvvamily out there,
I am just in the planning of importing a 3D Animation into v4. It is very simple one. It shall be a turning Page of a book, like in this blender tutorial
There are some completly different ways I could do this. And while I am trying to find out, which one is the easiest for me, I thought I will share my research so far and may be some of you can give me some tips on my way.
So ways to import an Animation into v4:
Importing the Animation into Stride Studio. For this I need my 3D Model, it need to be rigged with a skeleton and I need an animation file to cotrol this. Like discribed in this forum post Importing a Stride Prefab to gamma - #5 by tonfilm
This would take quite some time for me, because I need to check first, how to do this rigging in blender and export seperate files for skeleton, animation and 3D model
Import a Alembic File (.abc) and go with the help patch “HowTo Read Alembic Archive.vl” from the vl.Alembic. here would be my question, how to prepair the abc File.
so I went with an Alembic File and it was an easy way to go. with the Export from Blender to .abc all animations are automatically “baked”, like saved frame by frame. For this kind of task the Alembic Format is made for. https://www.alembic.io/
Yes, it’s the help patch, which I mentioned in way 2. I just reduced some stuff of it. In the beginning I had some lila nodes because I didn’t have a point sequence in my alembic scene, like in the example, but getEntity worked fine for me.
There is also this cumbersome workflow involving the stride editor to setup a prefab and load it in gamma. Once you jump all hoops the outcome is quite good. performance seems nice too and you get bones and skinning animations.
Help patch to look for: “How to modify Entities from a Stride Project”
Good to know. Thanks for sharing. And if you go the way through stride studio you always need the skinning with bones, isn’t it? this part would have taken some time for me, because i have so little experiences with it. But may be next project.
Think so. But its far more efficient than the alembic per vertex animation.
I did not make the animation btw., so did not need to deal with the skeleton/skinning setup.
I keep you updated on my learnings.
I want to keep the turning page low poly but with smooth edge rendering. If I go in Blender and choose Object> shade Smooth, this will be ignored in the alembic file. so I use two different modifiers: generate > Subdivision surfaces (with keep corners seleced) and Normals > smooth by angle.
this is giving me smooth edges
in vvvv I use “Light direciton Shadow Map” to have better shadow results
sorry, I was wrong .The subdivision modifier it giving the same result, like if you subdivide the mesh. so now I am having tones of vertices and i am killing the performance.
I know usually you use normal maps, to give the object the impressing of having a higher resolustion, but when the page is turning and the shape is deforming, the nomal map would need to be a video, wouldn’t it?
cool. Thanks for going through this with me together.
what is the edges of your 3D Model making it smooth? Or do I just don’t see it because of the light and shadow settings?
The alembic seems not that bad. probably depends on the vertex count you want to animate at once. not sure how much is happening on the cpu vs the gpu in comparison.
