Hey all, I am working on an interactive art project and am a little stumped on how to proceed. Long story short my end goal is have a website that will host an interactive object made in blender. I would like the object to be fully interactive. Think of it as a 3d model of a book that one can mouse or touch over to interact with: flipping pages with the mouse cursor or touch screen, as well as moving the book as a whole and zooming in and out of the pages.
Is there a plugin or something similar that would allow me to import a constrained blender model (so all parts move in relation to eachother, pages staying on the spine, etc) and just put it onto a site? Something like a plugin that sketchfab player, but a bit more robust so one can interact with the object more than just zooming in and out and rotating the object. I realize I am just describing a very simple game, and I am thinking this would be a task for unity via blender assets, but anything to streamline and simplify the process would be wonderful, I am a C# and Unity noob to the max and would like to do this project in the near future.
Thanks for your time.
sstuckychubers That sounds like a decent project to start off with!
I'm going to say that Unity will be a great place to get the interaction between the model and user going.
For the model in Blender: I would maybe suggest animating the object and sending those model animations over to unity to take care of the interaction to trigger the animations.
There's always more ways to do this though: I know some amazing shader artists have done and entire book opening up and closing again with shader nodes but I'm not even experienced enough to describe how they went about doing that. @jlampel did nodevember and showcased that in one of the live streams if you are interested.
Hi Anthony, there is Verge3D, it is a paid license and is made by the creators of:
Blend4Web, which has a free version ( you'll have to share your .blend).
Both use some kind of Visual Programming which is quite easy to learn. The downside of Verg3D is the price and the downside of Blend4Web is that it doesn't support 2.8 (yet). The latest Vegre3D supports Blender 2.81.
But I think they do exactly what you want and it's worth checking out their websites.
For instance here are some examples of what has been made with Blend4Web: https://www.blend4web.com/en/demo/
And for Verge3D: https://www.soft8soft.com/gallery/
There are some overlapping projects like the NASA one, which are claimed by both:
Experience Curiosity is an interactive 3D web application developed by NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory using the commercially licensed Blend4Web SDK.
Experience Curiosity, an amazing project powered by Verge3D, was created by NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory.
Here is a talk from the Blender Conference 2017 : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iKW1qYcXBcM&list=PLa1F2ddGya_9XER0wnFS6Mgnp3T-hgSZO&index=21&t=0s
Hi Anthony,
You can also have a look at https://threejs.org/ which is a javascript framework capable of loading a lot of the files Blender can export. It does have animation support as well. I used it to write an interactive vehicle configurator prototype and it is quite powerful. If you only have basic html and javascript knowledge you can use a lot(and they have a lot) of the examples on their site to base your project off of but a beginners course on javascript would help you a fair amount as well.