BSLIVE Baking Animated Cycles Shader as Video Texture Material for Apple AR
#VideoTexture #AR #RealityKit
The other day I was testing AR and Video Texture feature that is new with iOS 14 and iPadOS 14. Basically for AR on iPad and iPhone, you can easily use video texture now. It requires a bit of knowledge of XCode if you want to use this right away, via their RealityKit Swift module.
I am showing you the whole process in this short video:
1) Prepare the animated Cycles texture in Blender. I use Animation Nodes to animate the parameter of Cycles node.
2) For the baking of video texture into the UV of 3D mesh, I am using “Animated Render Bake” by Janne Karhu. It’s an addon that is separate from Blender.
3) I use Blender Video Sequence Editor aka VSE to export as video that XCode can understand.
4) Going into XCode, now you simply bring in the MP4 video and follow the tutorial below:
“Using Video Texture Materials using RealityKit”
https://medium.com/@ethansaadia/video-materials-in-realitykit-35038d3758d3
5) In my case, I am bringing my own 3D asset from Blender, that has been exported as USDZ, imported into Reality Composer, for XCode as RCProject asset.
6) Use ARKit if you like to enable occlusion in AR.
Finally you simply assign the video texture into the mesh of 3D objects. It’s an interesting process and something you can do yourself.
Hopefully this can be so much simpler in the future, I am hoping for USDZ asset itself can hold a video texture. Anyhow, VIDEO TEXTURE on 3D is really quite powerful and you can create a lot of interesting Blade Runner futuristic type of moving banners. You can perhaps simulate 3D Projection Mapping into real buildings (see VIVID SYDNEY) or real objects using this process. Maybe that’s the next project.
