It’s been a very informative week.

First interesting problem is how to begin dev and testing of a multi touch interface when you don’t have one to use! (wee!) Fortunately there is a few fun tools built by others in the CV world that can get you up and running quickly. There is much information to be had looking around in the NUIGROUP forums based around building your own touch tables. My immediate timeline didn’t let me play with full tables (sad!), fortunately Seth Sandler had put together a nice DIY project involving a webcam, some cardboard, glass, and a sheet of vellum, run on the Community Core Vision package . That got me multi touch input with output to the TUIO protocol fairly easily!

Next, looking into how to handle the TUIO inside of unity, there are a few main packages that work well, (Among others found at : tuio.org) I ended up with two that got serious consideration, the Mindstorm tuio, and the UniTUIO by the guys at xtuio, the code and overall base of the mindstorm system looked more solid and cohesive, but due to the schedule I ended up with the unituio for expediency sake, because it converts the TUIO touches to unitys base input system, by way of building bridged Input class and overriding the get touch functions. There is some editing needed to bring it back up to date with the 3.5 changes, but its minor and the console error log should get you there.

Now! The fun part, things are starting to work, now we can get down to biz. (Almost) There are a few other things to take into account, tuio systems are not taken into account with the built in unity gui. Alternate ui systems that work fairly easily with them are EZGUI and NGUI, I went with NGUI, and have been very happy with the support response time, and solid performance. I also adapted the truly awesome FingerGestures to use the tuio inputs, so now I’ve got a framework that works on all platforms, and with a loader for finger gestures that checks for the presence of the tuio inputs, and loads those, or else, reverts to base mouse input as needed. future: combine the two inputs so that there is no manual work on export!

One more: depending on the touch screens you’re using, you may need to convert windows 7 touches to tuio, I did this with the Touch2Tuio program. built in Windows 7 touches are functional for 1 touch, and the pinch to zoom gesture gets converted to the scroll wheel by default in unity 3.5 (And I believe it started working in 3.0 or 3.4.. the forum is vague on this.)

Performance wise, it still misses entirely too many touches for my peace of mind as a long term solution, but it worked quickly, and got us through the initial conference expo, and was a success! so work will continue, and it will get better and bigger and faster and more awesomeness. or something. I don’t know that I’d suggest this system for a long running exhibit, but it worked fine in the 3-5 day range for me.

Cheers.

the system is fairly simple rig that attaches as a script to the IK End Effector, and parses up the hierarchy collecting any bones that are tagged with a certain empty class (In my case called an EndJoint).

I collect bone joints at runtime after combining and configuring the hierarchy, and pass them into the CCD IK function as an array of unity transforms. the bulk of the code is taken almost directly from Jeff Lander’s game developer article describing the Cyclic Coordinate Decent (CCD) inverse kinematics algorithm, written in 1998,

the port can be downloaded from here: IKCCD2D.zip

the videos below are captured in HD in unity directly from some premade itween paths

Exterior axo from Dave Buck on Vimeo.

Realtime HD Architecture, Captured in Unity3D from Dave Buck on Vimeo.

Basic workflow was to export out the WorkSets from Revit as individual FBX files
Import them into 3dsmax with the file link manager, usually set to combine objects by material
from there run a set of scripts that collapsed / welded / AutoSmoothed / split meshes that were too large (65k verts is a pain) cleans up the layers, replaces materials, and exports the now unity friendly layers into different FBX’s for unitys consumption

Inside unity there are a few small steps needed, done mostly with AssetPostProcessors that hook up any external lightmaps that we generated in max, replace/reconnect any materials that are in our standard material library, and attach any components that are supplied in the max user properties fields.

bake the lighting to suit, (In this case, just give us some AO and Sunlight since we needed to be able to turn around revit design changes -> working webplayer overnight with minimal user babysitting.)

this workflow allowed the building owner to ‘walk’ around the design very rapidly after it was changed.

There are a few more captures up at http://vimeo.com/vsai/videos/ for anyone interested.

Slightly awkward, but it turns out that there is an -unsafe compiler option that needs to be turned on in unity/mono, and that you can do this very easily on a per project basis by adding a file ‘smcs.rsp’ to the root of your assets dir, and in there you can add the text ‘-unsafe’ to add this to the compiler commandline.

Reference threads: Setting Compiler Options, Unsafe code in Unity, How To: Set Project-Wide #pragma Directives with JavaScript

Other apparent uses stated in the threads are setting project wide defines and pragmas

and thrown into an easy to follow group at: Google Reader Bundle: Tech Arts 2011 

for anyone else thats deeply into this google reader bug, but doesn’t want to add them all by hand.

placed in a plain text file named .htignore in your project directory

syntax: glob

*.tmproj
*.pidb
*.sln
*.userprefs
*.csproj
*.unityproj

AnnotationManager
assetDatabase3
AssetImportState
assetservercachev3
AssetVersioning.db
BuildPlayer.prefs
BuildSettings.asset
EditorSettings.asset
EditorUserBuildSettings.asset
expandedItems
FailedAssetImports.txt
guidmapper
InspectorExpandedItems.asset
MonoManager.asset
ScriptMapper

cache/*
Temp/*
metadata/*
ScriptAssemblies/*
previews/*

The Mercurial in Daily Use guide seems to be a good list of things that you might wish to do

Some notes for myself, but might be useful to someone else getting started also.

edit: To start a local serve on my workstation that my laptop can push to, use the command line

to pass your changes up from the laptop to the workstation:

and on the workstation use:

to get the latest updated file revisions locally..

and you’re sync’d. fun times.

Interactive 3D OR/ICU design tool from Dave Buck on Vimeo.

here’s a current video of my OR/ICU design project, created in unity3d, with fully configurable parametric models rigged with both IK and FK, and a tool to quickly draw out any layout of walls, windows and doors to spatially visualize the placement and reach of equipment needed in an operating room space.

Say I have a custom class that I’m using to store a structured set of data, this time we’ll play with “ArmDefs”. ArmDef’s just hold a little string and int based data and a list of ArmDef’s as children, and a second list of GameObjects that contains all of the models for this section of arm for use to serialize to disk, but thats more a story for another time.

Overall this is used to build up a hierarchy that holds the “contents” of a runtime modular rig, and handles the Saving/Loading/Reloading.

To work with this I needed to set up a pile of recursive functions to edit the tree at runtime, since I don’t know the depth of the hierarchy, and rebuild the system as needed.

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[System.Serializable]
//Inheriting from ISerializable gives us
//an easy access to Serialization to disk
public class ArmDef : ISerializable {
    public string Name;
    public List<ArmDef> Children = new List<ArmDef>();
 
    public ArmDef(string iFile)
    {
        this.Name= iFile;
        this.Children = new List<ArmDef>();
    }
 
    public void AddChild(ArmDef child)
    {
        Children.Add(child);
//just wrapping the Add so that we can do "extra"
//stuff here if we want, like add links to parents etc
    }
}

not really building these thru scripts out in the wild but just to build something to work with here.

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public ArmDef config = new ArmDef("Base Level");
 
//add a couple children
config.AddChild(new ArmDef("Level2a"));
config.AddChild(new ArmDef("Level2b"));
config.AddChild(new ArmDef("Level2c"));
 
//add a couple grandchildren
config.Children[1].AddChild(new ArmDef("Level3a"));
config.Children[1].AddChild(new ArmDef("Level3b"));

ok thats all the boring stuff for now! here is a Generic Recursive function that walks down a tree and does ‘Action<>‘ to all children of ‘parent’. The key here is that the Action<> pretty much rocks. !

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public void HandleArmDef(Action<ArmDef> item, ArmDef parent)
{
    if (parent.Children.Count > 0)
    {
        foreach (ArmDeft in parent.Children)
        {
            HandleArmDef(item, ti);
        }
    }
    item(parent);
}

Now the fun begins when you start to chain this stuff together to “act” on all children.
we can define that “Action item” in the above function to be something else using some Lambda or Delegate type stuff. (I’m learning here, those are the reading points for the moment!)

This will go through the hierarchy and remove all children with the Name of “Level3a”.

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string toDelete = "Level3a";
HandleArmDef(item => { item.Children = item.Children.Where(child => child.Name != toDelete).ToList(); }, config);

In another example, i wanted to search the hierarchy and see if there was a certain value anywhere in the hierarchy. easiest way i found was to just quickly build a flattened list and use the Linq “Any” function to see if the string was found anywhere in the hierarchy.

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List<string> flatList = new List<string>();
HandleArmDef(item => { flatList.Add(item.Name ); }, parent);
bool isCurrentlyFlat = flatList.Any(x => x.Contains("Flat"));

in another case, i wanted to insert a new child into the hierarchy as a child of a specific object.

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void AddChildAddon(ArmDef parent, string addAsChildOf, string newChild)
{
    //for each object 'item' down the hierarchy
    //if the item.Name contains our addAsChildOf string
    //we'll add the newChild as a child to the item.
    HandleArmDef(item =>
    {
        if (item.Name.Contains(addAsChildOf))
        {
            item.Children.Add(new ArmDef(newChild));
        }
    }, parent);
}

there’s plenty more possibilities of things to do here if I’ve explained well enough!
More info on Linq by example