@fxrtst This is great! If you would know how many hours I spend getting the rotational values right in 3ds max, and how impossible it was to rig my robot correctly! After almost one year, changing the tool made it happen in less than a week! So good you brought up Unity!

Besides live motion and playback, we will be having a ton of options for our robots now! One of them being a fully IK controlled robotic arm that is controlled via Occulus Rift controllers....which was the first idea of this threat!

I am pretty sure we can get a simple script going which can be used easily within Unity so you would just have to drag and drop objects to send the rotations...

It might be even good to keep parts of that servo plugin you are using right now?

Anyways, I will clean up my messy code, and upload the scene once I am back from work...this is great!

Haha yes rigging can be very frustrating. I hurt my back in 1997 and could not work as a make up effects artist for a year. I taught myself computer animation and worked from home. Unfortunately it was Lightwave and not Maya or I might have switched careers! But I worked for a company that created a tv show called Startroopers roughnecks. It was a kids tv series. One of the first CGI kids tv shows. But you had to be an all rounder. Had to do everything, modeling, lighting, rigging, painting.

Anyways it is exciting to look at the potential for this system. VR, Ik and robots. What more could you want?! Game changer. It’s very exciting.

Getting it all connected ( ARC to unity) and capturing the rotational values to send via http will be tricky (well for me anyways ha!). Be nice to be able to capture translated values as well. I have some ideas for that too!

Hopefully I’ll get that model cleaned up and rigged this week. So we can have a good model to test with. Make sure you grab Bio Ik so the scene will work when we share!

Quote:

Hopefully I’ll get that model cleaned up and rigged this week. So we can have a good model to test with. Make sure you grab Bio Ik so the scene will work when we share!

Good idea...I will get myself the plugin and start learning about it's functionality, and once you are done rigging the virtual JD I will hook it up to ARC!

Capturing the translated values should not be a problem either, we can build a script doing so in Unity...

Guys, Thanks for the videos and the information. I still need more time, I feel lost inside Unity, is like being in Airplane cockpit a lot of buttons I'll need to schedule some time to learn the foundations.

@Mickey: JD fbx: me and Blend we are not blended When you have time can you clean up the file, remove all the non relevant stuff, also there are a lot of dots everywhere, can you also confirm the nodes/joints are correct. Not urgent.

@PTP Mickeys model has alot of extra stuff due to the way that 3D Studio max compounds parts. I am rebuilding the JD Model with all the correct joints, so that it will work inside Unity. Hopefully I will have that done soon.

Yes Unity is not the easiest program to grasp if you have no background in 3d packages. That said it is a gaming engine and that works very different from 3d animation packages!. You don't need to know all the buttons, just the ones we will be using. One of my videos explains the 3 or 4 sections we will be using.

Once we have scenes/projects and a model to share then we can work together to figure out a pipeline.

@everyone I did find that all the c# code is hidden under the UI, in the stack. There is a little gear icon next to every item (far right), if you click on that it opens the script in visual studio for editing. (see code for the servo control with the plugin below) I have no idea if this helps our cause, just pointing it out.

using UnityEngine;
using System.Collections.Generic;

using UINT8 = System.Byte;


namespace Ardunity
{
	[ExecuteInEditMode]
	[AddComponentMenu("ARDUnity/Controller/Motor/GenericServo")]
    [HelpURL("https://sites.google.com/site/ardunitydoc/references/controller/genericservo")]
	public class GenericServo : ArdunityController, IWireOutput<float>
	{
		public int pin;
		public bool smooth = false;

		[Range(-45, 45)]
		public int calibratedAngle = 0;
		[Range(-90, 90)]
		public int minAngle = -90;
		[Range(-90, 90)]
		public int maxAngle = 90;
		[Range(-90, 90)]
		public float angle = 0;

		public Transform handleObject;


		private int _preCalibratedAngle = 0;
		private int _preMinAngle = -90;
		private int _preMaxAngle = 90;
		private float _preAngle = 0;
		
		protected override void Awake()
		{
			base.Awake();
			
			enableUpdate = false; // only output.
		}

		void Start()
		{
			_preCalibratedAngle = calibratedAngle;
			_preMinAngle = minAngle;
			_preMaxAngle = maxAngle;
			_preAngle = angle;
		}

		void Update()
		{
			if(handleObject != null)
			{
				angle = handleObject.localRotation.eulerAngles.y;
				if(angle > 180f)
					angle -= 360f;
			}

			if(_preCalibratedAngle != calibratedAngle)
			{
				calibratedAngle = Mathf.Clamp(calibratedAngle, -45, 45);
				if(_preCalibratedAngle != calibratedAngle)
				{
					_preCalibratedAngle = calibratedAngle;
					SetDirty();
				}
			}

			if(_preMinAngle != minAngle)
			{
				minAngle = Mathf.Clamp(minAngle, -90, _preMaxAngle);
				if(_preMinAngle != minAngle)
				{
					_preMinAngle = minAngle;
					if(angle < _preMinAngle)
						angle = _preMinAngle;
				}
			}

			if(_preMaxAngle != maxAngle)
			{
				maxAngle = Mathf.Clamp(maxAngle, _preMinAngle, 90);
				if(_preMaxAngle != maxAngle)
				{
					_preMaxAngle = maxAngle;
					if(angle > _preMaxAngle)
						angle = _preMaxAngle;
				}
			}

			if(_preAngle != angle)
			{
				angle = Mathf.Clamp(angle, _preMinAngle, _preMaxAngle);
				if(_preAngle != angle)
				{
					_preAngle = angle;
					SetDirty();
				}
			}
		}
		
		protected override void OnPush()
		{
			Push((UINT8)Mathf.Clamp(_preAngle + _preCalibratedAngle + 90, 0, 180));
		}
		
		public override string[] GetCodeIncludes()
		{
			List<string> includes = new List<string>();
			includes.Add("#include <Servo.h>");
			return includes.ToArray();
		}
		
		public override string GetCodeDeclaration()
		{
			string declaration = string.Format("{0} {1}({2:d}, {3:d}, ", this.GetType().Name, GetCodeVariable(), id, pin);
			if(smooth)
				declaration += "true);";
			else
				declaration += "false);";
			
			return declaration;
		}
		
		public override string GetCodeVariable()
		{
			return string.Format("servo{0:d}", id);
		}
		
		float IWireOutput<float>.output
        {
			get
			{
				return (float)angle;
			}
            set
            {
				if(value > 180f)
					value -= 360f;
				else if(value < -180f)
					value += 360f;
				angle = (int)value;
            }
		}
		
		protected override void AddNode(List<Node> nodes)
        {
			base.AddNode(nodes);
			
            nodes.Add(new Node("pin", "", null, NodeType.None, "Arduino Digital Pin"));
            nodes.Add(new Node("angle", "Angle", typeof(IWireOutput<float>), NodeType.WireTo, "Output<float>"));
        }
        
        protected override void UpdateNode(Node node)
        {
            if(node.name.Equals("pin"))
            {
				node.updated = true;
                node.text = string.Format("Pin: {0:d}", pin);
                return;
            }
			else if(node.name.Equals("angle"))
            {
				node.updated = true;
                return;
            }
            
            base.UpdateNode(node);
        }
	}
}

@fxrtst this is exactly what I was thinking to do... So we will try to build a script that is sending the rotational values over to the ARCs Http Server by using the object rotations. Or we will hijack the servo plugin and modify the code so rather than having it send out the values to the COM port it'll send them to the Http Server, all of this should be fairly easy!

Excellent! My wife is back today, so hopefully I can get going on the IK and rebuild the model. Now I wish I had a JD Robot to connect this to! Now I think about it I could just print one!

I wonder if you could use the MQTT plugin to connect. Looks a little old last update 2014 but may provide more reliable connectivity versus the http server. https://github.com/vovacooper/Unity3d_MQTT https://synthiam.com/redirect/legacy?table=plugin&id=169