Orbcreation Blog

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	Sailaway release date announced Born from the desire to sail more often than I can, Orbcreation announces "Sailaway". Virtual sailing on a global scale Sailaway simulates ocean sailing and cruising on a global scale. Undertake challenging journeys to any place or island in the world. In order to be as realistic as possible, the system uses: - real weather - real sail trim - real distances And since the earth is a very big place, crossing the Atlantic or Pacific will probably take you months. That may not s... read more
	New sky shader The shader for the day and night sky has been completely rewritten. It has become more realistic and depending on the time of day, position on the globe, humidity and cloudiness, it can give stunning some effects.
	Ocean colors The ocean for the new global sailing simulator now has a new shader, that behaves just like the real ocean does. When the water is completely clear with no algae of sand particles floating around, it has an indigo blue color. As the sea gets deeper, there is no light reflected from the bottom and this makes it appear darker. When there are algae in the water the color will turn towards green. And with a lot of mud particles floating around, it becomes brownish. Water that has a lot of... read more
	Simulated sky and ocean Work on the sailing simulator advances steadily. Since the sky is the main source of reflection for the ocean underneath, the work on the atmosphere had to be completed first. Lots of little enhancements have been made and especially the cumulus clouds have more volume now. With the main reflection source in place, it was the ocean's turn to be tweaked and optimized. Here are some results: The basis for the sky is the Tenkoku sky module that is available in the Asset Store, but the shad... read more
	Using GRIB data to simulate weather For a global sailing simulator we needed a to provide current weather conditions for every location on the planet. Weather services around the world provide most their weather data as downloads in GRIB format. The best location for this the NOAA website. They have a list of all available downloads here. There is a lot of information in these files, that are really not needed for this purpose, so first we made a list of values we rea... read more
	Sailing simulator prototype It's not smart to let your hobby influence your work too much. But hey, we're only human. This sailing hobby could potentially lead to a mega project. Who knows? In any case, the first steps have been made by creating this prototype of a sailboat simulation. There are of course many sailboat simulators, but none are able to simulate the effects of the shape of the sail. This all new prototype computes the bending of the air around the sail and calculates the forces accordingly. To help you... read more
	From Daz3D model to Unity3D GameObject For this example, I created a basic Daz3D model with some default clothes. Next I selected File - Export and Autodesk FBX. This window pops up: I selected Merge Clothing into Figure Skeleton because I want to end up with 1 skeleton and several skinned meshes on that skeleton. I closed Daz3D, opened Unity and dropped the FBX file on the Unity project. It takes a while since this is a big mesh. I got a warning about the meshes being too big, but Unity splits it up for m... read more
	Improving Asset Store sales - evaluation 2 months ago I set out to improve the sales of my Unity Asset Store packages. I am just a developer, not a marketeer and so far all i really did was trying to build a good product. But a good product is useless if no one knows about it. I had 7 packages with handy tools and scripts for developers, that together brought about $ 70 per month. Which is hardly worth the trouble of uploading them. A summary: $ 70 revenue per month 25 website visits per day 52 twitter followers 168 facebook like... read more
	3D website builder progress Orbcreation's previous 3D Website builder has never become the big succes I secretly hoped for. This was due to a lot of reasons, but one of them was the inability for the user to upload it's own 3D models and textures in a easy way. Since I think 3D websites deserve a second chance, I am building a completely new system from scratch. And this time it will have a lot of import features. In this blog post I will try to show how this import module works. For that I will take a relatively com... read more
	Improving the presentation for SimpleCollada This post is part of the experiment: How to improve Asset Store sales. The current presentation has a short description. On Reddit I got the comment that many people don't even know what Collada is. The key images are dark and dull. The icon is a simple black surface with text on it. The current price is $20, which may be a bit much. So I reduced it to $15.00 The package was sold 5 times in 5 months. The current key image... read more
	Improving the presentation for SimpleLOD This post is part of the experiment: How to improve Asset Store sales. The presentation of this cool package on the Asset Store is everything but cool at the moment. There is no video, the key images are dark and dull and the description could use some improvements as well. So here we go. I recorded a HowTo video and put it online at YouTube. The current key images loo... read more
	How to improve AssetStore sales - day to day report Day to day report of all actions I performed to increase the sales of my AssetStore packages. The overall plan can be found here. Day 1 (November 24th, 2014) - Written blog post about the plan to improve asset store sales - Send 3 tweets with the link to the blog post - Scheduled to repeat 2 of these tweets at 2 and 3 AM CET for US timezones - Added Facebook... read more
	How to improve AssetStore sales Part 1: Problem definition As a Unity developer I work on building a user tool for 3D websites. A web service that will allow ordinary people to create a 3D website and filling it it their own content like photo's and stories. This is an enormous project with lots of complex matters to deal with before a proper web service can be opened to the public. I decided that I will deal with each of these complex parts in my own way and distribute my solutions as AssetStore bundles that othe... read more
	Selection hall Work on the 3D website builder is proceeding nicely. We had some struggles with the new Unity UI system that is still in beta and has some weird quirks. But we managed to work around almost all of them. In this phase we focus primarily on managing your resources like 3D models and textures, that you will use in your 3D site. I already showed the model workshop, but now you can also select textures, change colors and change the shader(s) it uses. Selecting a texture is not like browsing ... read more
	Progress on new 3D website builder Work on the new 3D website tools is slowly but gradually making progress. Until recently, most of the work has been focusing on the database backend and overall structure. And important as this may be, there have not been a lot of cool things to show. But over the past few weeks development has started on the UI for uploading your own images and 3D models. The system has a neutral UI that will interfere as little as possible with the 3D website you are making. A side drawer will function as a... read more
	Pulldown menu added to FlexiGUI On webpages and almost all applications we are used to pull down menus and popup menus when we click something. This is however not natively supported in Unity3D, so these functions are now added to our FlexiGUI framework. The menu can consist of any number of sub menus and is nicely animated to fold open or close. Since simple pulldown menus are a bit boring, so we added a circular menu type. This menu will unfold as a circle around your cursor or around wherever you want it to appear. H... read more
	New Orbcreation website Orbcreation has a new logo and a brand new website, that makes us ready for the grand things we have planned for the coming future. With this website and logo we want to show you that we're a high tech company that radiates transparency and simplicity. It uses standard 2D HTML and plain JavaScript only but still gives a 3D effect and the illusion of reflection.
	Fried Locust To test our FlexiGUI developers framework we needed a simple game with different levels that require a different look and feel. It also had to run on pc and touch devices using the mouse on pc's and the internal gyroscope on the iPad/iPhone for steering. The test would be successful if no additional code would have to be written in the game logic for either platform. So we came up with "Fried Locust". You're a butterfly on a small and beautiful planet. However, the... read more
	FlexiGUI Unity3D is a great tool for building games and 3D environments, but to add a consistent 2D graphics interface for buttons, sliders, info panels and such, you quickly end up with a lot of inefficient code. To deal with that we've created a framework called "FlexiGUI" that handles all the 2D GUI elements on the screen. It scales for screensize, scales for DPI (like on Retina displays), deals with scrolling, modal windows, side drawers and much more. For instance: When you make a game that sh... read more
	3d website tools tutorials Tutorial explaining the keyboard and mouse interface. Tutorial in which we build an office with a meeting room. Tutorial explaining terrains.
	Opening ceremony 3d website tools On january 24th, 2012 the 3d website building tools were officially opened.

Virtual sailing on a global scale

Day 1 (November 24th, 2014)

Part 1: Problem definition