Day 20: Content Pipelines and such

Worked from home today. Sprained my foot yesterday which meant a mandatory rest at home so I couldn't come in to work.

The goal for Animation13

For Animation13, we want a fully automated system that makes the following a reality:

Have someone taking pictures of a kids head in a controlled environment, and transferring these to a PC.

The PC uses 123D Catch to export a model of the head.

The model is passed through an XNA program that generates 36 jpg's of the head in different states of rotation, these are combined into a gif and displayed on a webpage updated in real time. This webpage will be displayed in another room, within which we have the AR demo set up.

At the same time the model is also passed to the (currently running) AR demo, where it is automatically added to the model bank and can instantly be displayed within the AR software without having to stop, suspend or recompile the AR software.

XNA program 1: take an fbx, produce 36 jpegs of the model spinning.

Finished this today and uploaded the code to the central, the program iterates through 36 frames, on each frame the model is shown in a slightly different state of rotation, and on each frame the current render is dumped to a jpeg file. The resulting jpeg files are numbered head0.jpg to head35.jpg

XNA modification to AR, allow on-the-fly incorporation of models

XNA compiles all models (fbx etc) into xnb at compile time of the program. If you want to import a new model you have to recompile the program (or write your own content pipeline and loaders, but that would take too long to complete before Animation13) each time. This is obviously not acceptable, the AR program must be running continuously throughout Animation13.

Possible solution I will test: feed the AR program placer fbx files that get compiled into xnb etc.

Don't call load on the placer models.

After we get a kids head model, compile it into an xnb using another XNA program running side by side. Then replace the placer xnb files in ARdemo's content folder with our newly compiled xnb of a kids head. Now you can call load etc on those models.