What is a red bone in skeleton in Unreal Viewer? - maya

I'm learning Unreal Engine and Maya. I've imported my character mesh and skeleton into Unreal. It mostly looks fine, but I see a red bone in the Unreal skeleton Viewer.
What does this red bone indicate?

It is a Root Bone of a skeleton.
The pivot point of a Skeletal Mesh is always located at the Root Bone/Root Joint of the skeleton. This means it doesn't matter where the root of the skeleton is located within the scene. It will be thought as if it is at the World Origin (0,0,0) when exporting from a 3D modeling application.

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What is causing this OpenTK GLControl texture mapping problem?

I'm working on a Winforms project using GLControl 3.10 and I'm trying to use some legacy code written for mobile devices using Xamarin and OpenTK 1.0. It's almost working but I'm having a problem with texture mapping.
I have created a test cube textured with transparent PNG images. The first screen shot below is how it appears on the mobile devices. The second shows how it appears in the new WinForms project.
I've tried adjusting pretty much every GL function call I can find and tried modifying the shaders but I have no idea where the problem might lie. Does anyone have any suggestions where to look?

Export animation from .dae to scenekit

On WWDC 2015 - Session 606 - Enhancements to SceneKit there was an Fox example project which is available to download.
Can anyone say what is the correct collada file setttings when exporting model with skeletal animation from 3D tool into .dae file? For example in the demo project there is a "walk.scn".
I used 3D tool (Cheetah3D) to make a simple model with simple skeletal animation and export it in .dae, but I can't get my model to be animated on the scene.
If I use non skeletal animation in 3D tool and export it in .dae then model animation on the scene works perfect.
Maybe someone succeed with exporting model with skeletal animation using another 3D tool like Blender?

X3D imagetexture too large for browser

I'm creating a panorama in x3d and using a panoramic image as the texture for a sphere. The image I'd like to use for the texture is about 6 megs. This works fine in x3d viewers and chrome, though it takes a couple of seconds to load. Firefox, Safari and Internet Explorer will not apply the texture and leave me with a blank sphere. They don't seem to like images above about 2.5 megs.
Does anyone have an idea for a way around this?
If it's a limitation in the browser there's nothing you can do but you can find a workaround for this:
You could decrease the quality of the image or change some other parameters (compression format) in order to make it smaller (less than 2.5MB).
You can split the image into multiple pieces and then apply the separate pieces to the different parts of the sphere so that in the end you fully cover the sphere as you would have only one image being attached to the sphere.

Is there a way to animate the edges of an image in WPF?

We have a few icons in our WPF application. We want to do an animation, pretty much like a small beacon of light going around the edges of the animation, just endlessly going around it, and following the silhouette of the icons. We found a way to do it by manually creating a path around the icons and have the beacon follow that path (which matches the silhouette), but it's too much manual work because we have a lot of different shaped icons. We're wondering if there's a way for WPF to do this automatically, so we just have to program it once, and then using on the rest of the icons.
Any suggestion very welcome.
Thanks.
Edit
Something like this.
Gee. Isn't that overkill to use wpf animation capabilities for that? Can't you just create a bunch of small animations in Photoshop or using something else and just put them in?
Like animated .GIFs. the only problem would be that: if I'm remembering it right, WPF have problems with animating .GIFs as embedded resources. So you have to load them from the disk. Or you can have them as embedded resources, but you have to extract them temporarily to the disk and then load them into your app's window.
If you are using .NET 3.5 SP1 or greater and you are requiring a code solution instead of the animated GIFs, my suggestion would be a Pixel Shader. You would need to write your own Pixel Shader that does the following:
Detect the edges. http://www.codeproject.com/KB/openGL/EdgeDetection.aspx
Takes an input parameter that can be animated with a storyboard that indicates the position of the beacon. http://www.codeproject.com/KB/dialog/WpfParentWindowShader.aspx
Highlights the edge that is indicated by the beacon position parameter and returns the original color for all other points in the image.
If you haven't worked with Pixel Shaders I would recommend downloading the Shazzam Tool, http://shazzam-tool.com/. It includes an interactive development environment to create and test your shader on simple images and also includes a decent number of Pixel Shaders with source code to help you learn about them.

Display 360 Image in Silverlight 3.0 (Not Panorama)

I have a lot of images taken from a 360 camera which I would like to be able to display in Silverlight 3. They are NOT regular panorama images. The camera which took the image actually creates a distorted jpeg that becomes undistorted once wrapped around a sphere as a texture. I have desktop software that will allow viewing of the image (not just side-to-side, but straight up, down, etc.) and I need to try to get the same functionality in Silverlight. It is very similar to Google StreetView.
What I think I need is to create a sphere, wrap the jpeg on the sphere as a texture, then put the "camera" inside the sphere. I doubt this is possible in Silverlight, but perhaps there is a way to simulate this?
So far, Google searches aren't bringing anything up. Can anyone point me in the right direction to figure out how to do this? Are there any existing projects that do this?
An example of a typical image is here.
These might help you out (probably not). They are 3d engines for silverlight, but they will probably wrap the image outside of the sphere instead of inside, which is probably what you need.
Kit3D http://www.codeplex.com/Kit3D
Balder http://www.codeplex.com/Balder
Another, possibly more promising option, would be to use javascript. So far you've probably researched how to do this in Silverlight, but you might do some similar searching for using javascript for this. There may be an option out there already, and since Silverlight can interopt with Javascript, you might be in luck.
Your gonna have to map the texture to a sphere then, like you said. But afaik silverlight 3 doesn't support hardware accelerated 3d.
So your options are:
Try and find a silverlight software 3d library (Like this)
Write your own software rasterizer (multi page guide)
Hope this helps
You might want to try cropping a window from the image and display it. if the user want to go right, move the window right and crop. if the user wants to go left, move the window left and crop. to zoom out, expand the window, to zoom in make the window smaller. if you move the frame far right then stitch the image data from the left side.
You might need to modify the image to eliminate the distortion, this shouldn't be too hard and depends on the camera lens focal length.
Don't try mapping the image to a sphere, it is much harder.
At https://hdviewsl.codeplex.com it says that HD View SL (Silverlight version) supports
"orthographic (2D), with wrapping for 360-degree panoramas"
Also you could try to port PtViewer source code to Silverlight from Java if no one else has
UPDATE:
VRLight might be the solution in your case:
http://vrlight.thecloudsite.net/
http://vrlight.thecloudsite.net/tutorial.html
http://ivrpa.org/blog/3651/vrlight_vredit_20
Its author (Jurgen Eidt) is also making cPicture (http://cpicture.thecloudsite.net/index.en.html), if you can't find him from the VRLight site, try from the cPicture one, or try from his blog at IVRPA website (http://ivrpa.org/blog/3651), which seems to have recent posts

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