i share the fruits of a year of work on a 3d navigation system for gem.

goto: www.3rd-eye.at and click blog to download it.

i hope this will open many possibilities for tose interested in realtime 3d visuals and interactive installations.
i also hope you will like it and help me to improve it over time.

some more example files will follow, when i find the time to clean up.

knowen issues:
it was developed on win, it works also on other platforms, but the keyboardmapping was a problem i couldnt solve by now, if someone could help, id be glad.

please report if you experience bugs, and id be also glad to receive a note if you make somethig nice

GEM-Engine 1.0 is a collection of abstractions for PureData Extended.

It employs 3D navigation like you know it from 3D Programms like 3Ds Max or others in GEM, Pd's openGL engine.
It enables you to navigate in 3d space using your mouse, or other input devices. It provides objects to select and move things in space among many other useful little tools for creating your interactive realtime 3d scenes within Pd.

There is also a bunch of MaxScripts, that export coordinate lists of any kind of animated objects from 3DsMax to Pd. By this procedure you can use motion data produced by ParticleFlow, Physics Simulations, Biped-Skeleton Animations or whatever in GEM.
If you use another 3D Programm you will have to write your own export scripts, which shouldnt be hard to do. IF YOU SUCCEED please let me know, so i can include them in the package. I'd also be glad to hear your experiences with it, just drop me a mail sonsofsol@gmx.net

why PD?

* span the gemwindow over a couple of gfx-card outputs using expanded desktop mode (9 screens @ 1280 x 1024 is the most i did)

* use multiple inputs for machine user interaction like: Wii Controller (piped via osc from Karl Kenners Glovepie), MIDI devices, sensors with Arduino boards, Live Camera Tracking with openCV or EyesWeb, Wacom tablets, ARToolkit coordinates, SoundAnalysis… (procedures are platform dependend) ....actually pd can connect with whatever runs on electricity.

* output multichannel audio

* control mechatronics using Arduino, DMX or MIDI.

All this makes my little Gem engine a good place to start developing interactive multimedia installations or sound reactive VJ sets.

This is pretty awesome. How long did it take you to build it?

added a video tutorial

@fragee: i startred about a year ago. many hours

Congratulation... When I saw your video preview a few month ago I was very impressed, thanks a lot for sharing such a great tool!

thanks you so much for showing us the awesomeness of your gem engine and sharing all your hard work.. you are the best!

thanks mrpropre + tao.
did anybody experience crashes or other problems?
would be great to get a little feedback.

I just checked all the nice features right now and I didn't see any problem on win7.
I will go deeper into it next time and I need to test this max script also!

Hey sonofsol,

Great work, and thanks for making all the code available. It is truly mind-blowing.

I'm running into a problem right now with the textures not loading properly in the Agents example. I've attached a screenshot, any thoughts?

I tested it on a Macintosh G5 PPC running OS X 10.4 and Pd-Extended 0.41.4.

http://www.pdpatchrepo.info/hurleur/error_screenshot.jpg

@ pd123: this looks like an old GEM version. try the newest pd-extended.

Thanks for getting back to me. I just tried it on my regular system:

MacBook OS X 10.5 with Pd-Extended 0.42.5

Everything seems to be working besides the textures in the Agents example (and the arrow keys, but you already mentioned that above). Attached is another screenshot - it looks different from the previous system.

http://www.pdpatchrepo.info/hurleur/gem_engine_error2.jpg

this looks like [model] before Iohannes added uvw coordinates to it. are you using GEM 0.92.3?

Yeah, GEM 0.92.3

hmm...that is funny.
i have it right on linux and winXP with gem 0.92.3
im sure it has to do with the uvw coordinates on model.
IOhannes implemented this about a year ago.
do the other models display correctly?
if no, id guess it got forgotten in the mac branch...

Am I correct in thinking that the only other example of textures is with dancing biped? The textures do not display on this model either, it just appears flat grey.

Does this mean textures are currently not supported on Mac?

i think so...
file a bug report to gem list

i have only played with it a little bit and no errors so far for me on lubuntu.
i look forward to using this with some of my blender animations.

cool tao, id be happy to add scripts for blender. if you do this, you will need to export XYZ position coordinates and the angles in the form W XYZ (angleaxis).

anybody else tried it?

Hi everybody, it's my first post here!
Very good patch Sonsofsol!!!
Thanks for sharing with others.
Some small ( I hope) bugs: pd reports error ( win pc) :
zexy-2.2.3 (compiled: Sep 22 2010)
Copyright (l) 1999-2008 IOhannes m zmölnig, forum::für::umläute & IEM
error: pack: b: bad type
another :
error: pd-uzi.pd: no such object
when launching from c:/gem-engine, besides this two bugs, everything works, but it is not possible to launch examples from inside c:/Program Files /pd/extra/!!!new/gem-engine/ .
Is it possible to add colission detection to camera in cursor mode, and live (webcam) backgorund? Would be great...
Greg

hi greg! im glad you like it.
your bugs should dissapear if you add the gemengine path to pds external paths.
the example path is not working because of spaces in the path.

to get a webcam background just open the pix_video patch and set its gemhead number to -1

collision detection for the camera is also easy to do: just compare the 1st 3 coordinates of 'viewc' to the positions of the objects you want to have a collision test with.

hi, thanks for reply!
I will try webcam and collision detection tomorrow. Btw, in your earlier post you mention Max scripts converting animations to GEM engine format. Will you post them as well? I'm doing interactive 3d visualisation for my exhibition. I thought of using blender, but your patch will be much better for this. I plan to control camera motion with wii motion plus, which can be easily linked with pd.
Love your patch, Sonsofsol!