I work for a university as a 3d artist and a job has come up for an academic who wants to have a interactive diagram that runs on a browser on all devices.
The diagram is of a river bank with a formula that can be adjusted with sliders to calculate the river’s area, steepness, vegetation population, etc like so… (where the bottom river shows a change in steepness and added vegetation)
The question is do you think I could do this in blender somehow either with the game engine or drivers, so that sliders could change not only numerals but also the look of the river diagram?
I have pretty much zero experience with the game engine (but years with anything else to do with Blender) and before trying anything out wanted to know if it was possible to do something like this?
I have also seen this recent link to the game engine working on browsers and was wondering if this could work for this too?
Thanks for your time and look forward to your replies.
If you want to stay with the BGE I suggest to look for Burster. It is a Browser plugin, running the BGE.
What quality is it supposed to be? How much real-time is necessary?
There are several options o do that with the BGE (drivers are Blender only and doe not belong the the BGE logic). Due to it’s dynamic nature, you will need to do some Python coding.
It is possible. But as you are not familiar with the BGE, I think you should look for other alternatives. To me the BGE seems a bit overhead for that requirements.
The mentioned browser plugin might be what you need. But I do not know the details and how much custom behavior you can apply.
it seems Burster only works on PC and Unix so does that mean no mac, therefore no Safari, therefore no iPads which we know students use?
And preferably we would want to be as best quality as we could (eg nice to have flowing waters, with reflections, etc) and no lag when dragging a slider to adjust options.
And I’ll be working with a programmer so I’m sure he could delve into Python script.
The other alternative is doing it as 2d shapes using HTML5 code, but that might be at the sacrifice of the graphics quality.
Blend4web will do what you want (I think) (which is the link you posted at the top)
It isn’t BGE, so no-one here will be able to help you (probably), I haven’t had much of a look at it myself, just a couple test scenes to find out what it could do.
What it offers:
Cross platform (html5, so most modern browsers)
GLSL shaders (ie flowing waterfalls)
Direct export from blender including UV textures, light posistion/types and so on. Shadows have to be set up in their SDK though.
All exports to a single html file (caution about file-size though, it goes up fast as things are stored as ascii)
Fully programmable.
For changing parameters, I’d suggest animating it, as bones are supported in pretty much every game engine ever. Not sure how to do sliders. As I said, I only looked at it briefly.
However, It will be a lot of work no matter what engine/platform you end up picking. (I’d say allocate half a year or so unless you are a really fast study.)
