Playing animated 3D meshes

Discussions
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1

Hi,
In this post from 2021 a roadmap was drawn for different updates.

I would really love to be able to play 3D animated stuff in vuo but
as we are now in 2024 and still in 2.4 and this is planned for 2.6 version, this could take probably another 4-5 years maybe?
I had a big show last saturday and I realized how much I miss that feature (been voting on that since it was opened in 2015). I remember using vade002 model importer in QC I could just export any part of animated .dae from blender and load it up, it worked great. You can still do lot of stuff with vuo 3D filters like ripple, explode, pinch, displace,add noise to 3d object but if you could apply all these on animated collada, that would be a game changer for vj sessions I think.
There are not many apps that can do it now, QC dont load them on ventura anymore, Touch designer yes, but you have to go through Syphon and it would be great to be able to use publish vuo outputs directly from vdmx.
I wouldn’t mind to pay some extra…something like Vuo pro platinum maybe or something like that with a couple of most voted feature requests implemented for all the users interested in these? Or maybe paying some extra amount to get access to certain features?
Just checking to know what the options are or if something like that would be possible?

Thank you

2

I’d love to see USDZ support if possible? It’s becoming a standard and there’s good built-in support on all Apple platforms.

3

There is a way to play animated meshes in Vuo right now, with the help of a 3D modeling app. Here’s how you would do it with Blender:

  1. Download an animated mesh file, such as Blender’s Ellie Pose Library.

  2. Open the file in Blender.

  3. Export the animated mesh frames as individual object files.

  4. Use Vuo’s Fetch Scenes node to load the frames. Use Cycle through List -> Render Scene to Window to animate them.

ellie_animation_vuo

ellie_animation.zip (19.2 MB)

Our team is continuing to work on Vuo 2.5.0. Although it’s not going as fast as we would have hoped, we did include some preliminary work toward lists-of-lists/iteration in Vuo 2.4.3 and are making progress toward 2.5.0. The best way that people can get a favorite feature implemented within a definite timeframe is to hire our team for priority support / custom development.

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4

It’s wonderful indeed!
I am able to animate my own 3D model by loading it as sequential OBJ files into Vuo, but the textures fail to load. The model moves but it’s completely white.
Are there any points to be careful about when exporting from Blender or Cinema 4D, or when importing into Vuo?

5

This is great, I had no idea. Is it a new thing or it’s been possible for a while? I must have missed it at some point.
Will check it right now, thanks!

1 Like
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Yes, when exporting from Blender you must check export materials and change the Path mode to Copy, that way the textures will be copied to your mesh. Path mode by defauls is in Auto. Than make sure your vuo file and all the exported files (.obj+.mtl+exported textures are in the same folder).

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7

Thanks! It worked out well!
BTW, I’m trying to load an animation of about 500 frames, but it’s slow to start playing, probably because it needs to load all the sequentially numbered files? I wonder if the situation will improve once it becomes possible to directly load formats like FBX or DAE?

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Yes, I was just doing try outs now as well. Animation of about 50 frames with its textures takes about 13-14 seconds to load up in vdmx, so unfortunately this option cannot be considered for the live shows as vdmx comnpletely freezes for that moment.
Will try to decimate the mesh to more low poly and bring the texture size to 512x512, it should speed up loading but there probably still will be some delay.

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I agree. I tried a relatively low-poly, 480-frame animation in Resolume again, and it takes 8-9 seconds to load. Pre-caching is definitely essential for every live performances.
However, when I created several patterns of presets for the same model’s position, rotation, and camera angles in Resolume and tried switching between them, each switch resulted in a similar amount of loading lag, so I had no choice but to switch the control of these to OSC control.

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ah load balancing meshes for immediate triggering in VDMX. that’s the real fun stuff. once you find the right balance for your hardware it should be no problem.

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nah, I’ve been trying this on mac studio 2, which is pretty decent machine but still even without a textures, 50 frame animation takes about 7 seconds to load up in vdmx/vuo.
On a technical level I have no idea how this works, my guess is that as the node has to through all the animated .obj in the folder that probably causes the delay. Might be solved in the future by loading directly the collada file maybe?