Yeap you can do that with Ephestos, or you will be able to do it shortly. You can send data from pharo to blender but you cannot send data from blender to pharo. But thats is just a matter of adding a small of piece of code in python side so I will implement it probably today. So yes I hope this week if not today pharo inspector to be able to inspect blender data. I am not sure about the updating though, inspector update its display when the data changes to display the latest data , that would require to keep sending messages to blender to fetch the latest data, its not hard at all just that inspector will have to be modified to do that.I am not familiar with inspector internal so that is up to pharoers to do. So you can now change any model data inside Blender , not just geometry data but anything like textures, materials, animation data and tons more. The Python API has the same access to data structures that the Blender source has so in that department Ephestos is extremely powerful.
I have not hooked Ephestos to the Blender Game Engine yet, again that should not be more than an afternoon of work, so I will do it eventually. It may not even needs a change , most likely it wont , just a case of importing a python module. Shared 3d model ? sure that is also doable, when I add to Ephestos the ability to retrieve data from blender you will be able to create your own 3d model, your own pharo objects to wrap blender python objects. Generally you will be able to do anything you can do with Blender from Pharo. The only limitation is not expect the socket used by Ephestos to able to retrieve GBs or even MBs of Blender data in an instant, usually the kind of data that is that big is only the geometry data itself that can be millions of polygons. This is where a FFI solution would be better than my solution using sockets. But then would you want to play with GBs of data in pharo ? I think not. Be warned that Ephestos maps 1 by 1 to the Blender API , that means you have to learn the Blender API and if I implement support for Blender Game Engine then you will need to know the Blender Game Engine API if you want to create a game or a realtime interactive 2d or 3d demo of some sort. Some knowledge , just the basic stuff , of python is desirable too. The only difference is that instead of coding in python you code in pharo. Ephestos has access to all python libraries, and by everything I mean everything . So if you dont want to use the BGE you can use another game engine as long it supports cpython. Unity can work with ironpython from what I read, Ephestos may not work out of the box in that case but with minor modifications it should not be more than a hour of work to get Unity working with Pharo. Again I leave that to anyone that is seriously interested. Ephestos is super simple, very basic socket code, so its easy to port around. The only tricky part is how I parse Pharo syntax to python syntax using regex but I think the code is clear enough to be understood by any experienced pharo coder. Probably it can be improve in many diffirent ways too. The syntax parser however is limited to basic python syntax, like accessing objects , global variables and calling methods and functions. For more advanced stuff like defining python classes, functions, list comprehensions etc you will need to use python syntax inlined inside your Pharo code which Ephestos also offers as fallback. The parser could be expanded to more advanced python syntax I may improve that area in the future. But then I dont I have a problem writing some code in python from pharo. But as I said, the challenge is not using Ephestos but learning Blender and its API which both have a steep learning curve because they offer a ton of functionality. But then the same problem you will face using any of the very powerful Game engines out there. On Mon, Sep 15, 2014 at 12:30 PM, Hilaire <hila...@drgeo.eu> wrote: > May be I wrongly expressed: imagine a 3D game whose model world is in > Pharo then rendered in Blender (I guess model data need to be share between > Pahro and Blender, but graphic only reside on Blender). Now you could use > the Pharo dev tools like inspector & al. to play with your games. > With DrGeo analogy: it will be more like a shared 3D model between Pharo > and Blender, and controlled from Pharo. > > Le 15/09/2014 11:02, kilon alios a écrit : > >> It depends what you mean by control blender. Blender is 2 things a) >> C/C++ source code that implements all features that users use b) the >> Python API that allows to use all features that a user can use. Ephestos >> already allows full access to (b) . So for example if you wanted Dr Geo >> to export its data to blender so Dr Geo can convert its geometry to 3D >> and use all the nice features of blender you can do that already with >> ephestos. But for modifying existing functionality you need to get your >> hands dirty with the source. Implementing new fuctionality like >> importers / exporters etc is also doable via API so its doable via >> Ephestos. But cpu intense new fuctionality is done by modifying the >> source. >> >> > > -- > Dr. Geo - http://drgeo.eu > iStoa - http://istao.drgeo.eu > > >
