On the train to Mountainview
Cathy Leung | 17 March, 2010 | 13:45
This is now my 3rd year attending GDC in San Francisco. As with other years I usually take this opportunity to visit with my professor who resides in Mountainview, California and use the time on the train to write a post about C3DL, a summary of the year and things to come. In the first year, C3DL had just barely begun. All we had were a couple of spinny cubes. Nothing to write home about really but it was a start. With the extraordinary work put into the project by Andor Salga, and many others, the project showed vast improvements by the second year. We were loading Collada models, we had the foundations of a pretty cool project. Khronos had just announced its specification for what would become WebGL which means applications made with our library would eventually become usable by any browser that supported WebGL. When we first started, we had to use the Canvas 3D addon and it was only available for Firefox. Today, with WebGL, applications made with C3DL work in pre-release versions of Chrome, Firefox and Safari.
We continued working on the library and added several more features. We were also very fortunate to begin work on a different project which gave us the opportunity to actually use the technology that we had built. That project resulted in a web application named Motionview.
Motionview allows an artist to remotely preview and select portions of motion capture shots made at a studio. Initially we were involved with the project to work only on a data converter for the web application. The viewer for the web app was originally going to be done using flash. However, we saw how this project was closely tied with C3DL. After all this application allowed the viewing of an actor’s movement in 3D space. We introduced this idea to our partners on the project and they agreed to use it. I would like to thank both Bedlam Games and the Navarra group for applying our library in a real web application. If you are interested in trying out Motionview, please contact me.
In the fall Andor, went back to school full time and did some amazing work for the processing.js project as part of his open source class. He continued to work on C3DL part time during his studies and we made the port over to WebGL. In early February I had been invited to speak as part of a Khronos sponsored session at GDC and thus I am here for my third year.
This coming summer promises to be very interesting. We will be working with some industry partners to develop our library and to add some really interesting WebGL based applications. Like the development of the motion capture application, these applications will help us add new features to C3DL.
We continued working on the library and added several more features. We were also very fortunate to begin work on a different project which gave us the opportunity to actually use the technology that we had built. That project resulted in a web application named Motionview.
Motionview allows an artist to remotely preview and select portions of motion capture shots made at a studio. Initially we were involved with the project to work only on a data converter for the web application. The viewer for the web app was originally going to be done using flash. However, we saw how this project was closely tied with C3DL. After all this application allowed the viewing of an actor’s movement in 3D space. We introduced this idea to our partners on the project and they agreed to use it. I would like to thank both Bedlam Games and the Navarra group for applying our library in a real web application. If you are interested in trying out Motionview, please contact me.
In the fall Andor, went back to school full time and did some amazing work for the processing.js project as part of his open source class. He continued to work on C3DL part time during his studies and we made the port over to WebGL. In early February I had been invited to speak as part of a Khronos sponsored session at GDC and thus I am here for my third year.
This coming summer promises to be very interesting. We will be working with some industry partners to develop our library and to add some really interesting WebGL based applications. Like the development of the motion capture application, these applications will help us add new features to C3DL.
Hey, just wanted to say that you've got a nice
Charles | 21 March, 2010 | 22:11Hey, just wanted to say that you’ve got a nice library going here, def well positioned. I’m quite excited to see the future of webgl and your library with it.
Excellent, I'm looking forward to the progress you guys make.
Some Funky Dude | 15 April, 2010 | 2:38Excellent, I’m looking forward to the progress you guys make.
I'm having the darndest time with tutorials 2 and 3.
Jeff | 9 June, 2010 | 18:37I’m having the darndest time with tutorials 2 and 3. Everytime I try to view the associated HTML page I get the following error message:
16:30:41 Warning: Could not find file ‘duck.dae’. Check the path.
but duck.dae is in the same folder as my tutorial2.html. I even granted full access to the duck.dae file thinking that it might be a permissions issue, but the same error message appears.
Is there some other library that I’m missing? I am using a chrome browser and I can view webGL pages just fine with it. For some reason these tutorials (2 and 3 both) gack on loading this file. Any guidance would be appreciated. The simplicity of this library is exactly what I’m looking for. Thanks in advance!
I'm encountering similar issues, and as near as I can
peter | 5 August, 2010 | 15:09I’m encountering similar issues, and as near as I can tell it is a feature of chrome and webkit. They don’t seem to like opening local files, though at the time the tutorials were posted they did allow it. While I understand it is done for security reasons, it makes testing a bit of a hassle. The way I’m working around it is to test locally with minefield, then post it on a server and test with webkit and chrome.
If anyone else has a better solution, I’d be happy to hear it.
I’ll add a warning about this to the tutorials.
I'm not able to see any of the demos in
koi | 3 September, 2010 | 15:22I’m not able to see any of the demos in my browsers (firefox 4beta 4 / chromium 6.0.405.0) running.
Nor on old ATI 9600 neither on newer AMD 4850 grafics hardware,
while most of WebGL examples do – so any updates?
greets – koi
Hi all, We are currently working on a release that will
Cathy Leung | 8 September, 2010 | 9:54Hi all,
We are currently working on a release that will work with the upcoming browser releases with WebGL. Its not quite ready yet and things tend to break on a daily basis but we expect this to change soon as browser get WebGL implemented. If you want our pre-release development version of the library please get it from this github repo
http://github.com/asalga/c3dl/tree/staged
An update: You can also get Chrome and Chromium
peter | 8 September, 2010 | 10:03An update: You can also get Chrome and Chromium to access files when viewing pages locally by adding –allow-file-access-from-files to the flags when you start them.
There’s probably something similar for Webkit, but I haven’t found it yet.
Hi all, I am also not enable to see the tutorial2
ced | 16 September, 2010 | 3:58Hi all,
I am also not enable to see the tutorial2 running on any brother supporting WebGL.
I have first fix two problems:
First the script try to load the image file canvas3dapiloading.gif instead of canvas3dapi/loading.gif. the / was missing in init.js.
Second is that I had loaded the duck.dae file by clicking on the link of the tutorial 2 page. So my brother has saved a duck.dae.html file.
But this does not be sufficient.
Now there seem to be a problem with the shade,
I have that message in the bottom of the page:
10:19:24 Error: vert shader: ERROR: 0:1: ‘gl_FrontColor’ : undeclared identifier ERROR: 0:1: ‘assign’ : cannot convert from ‘uniform mediump 4-component vector of float’ to ‘float’ ERROR: 0:1: ‘gl_TexCoord’ : undeclared identifier ERROR: 0:1: ‘gl_TexCoord’ : left of ‘[‘ is not of type array, matrix, or vector ERROR: 0:1: ‘assign’ : cannot convert from ’4-component vector of float’ to ‘float’ ERROR: 0:1: ‘gl_TexCoord’ : left of ‘[‘ is not of type array, matrix, or vector ERROR: 0:1: ‘s’ : field selection requires structure, vector, or matrix on left hand side ERROR: 0:1: ‘gl_TexCoord’ : left of ‘[‘ is not of type array, matrix, or vector ERROR: 0:1: ‘t’ : field selection requires structure, vector, or matrix on left hand side ERROR: 9 compilation errors. No code generated.
Those errors are caused when using an older version of
peter | 21 September, 2010 | 9:43Those errors are caused when using an older version of the library, but a recent version (within the last two weeks or so) of one of the browsers. As Cathy commented we’re working on a release that has that issue (and several others) fixed, but it’s not quite ready yet. For now, you can obtain a pre-release version (that does have that issue fixed) from our github repo.
I’ll add a temporary comment to the tutorials to let people know about this.
I am not able to display .dae file in google
preksha | 1 March, 2011 | 3:03I am not able to display .dae file in google chrome locally..but when i load it through server it works well.Hoping to get a positive response from you..!!
In order to access local files you need to start
peter | 14 March, 2011 | 8:36In order to access local files you need to start chome (or chromium) from a terminal with the flag –allow-file-access-from-files. This gets covered (a little) in tutorials 1 and 2.