Is ARToolKit integratable in JME3?

Hi,



My name is Jesse Kirschner, and I’m busy with an art (hopefully soon open source) project.

The program I’ve written is completely JAVA based. I’ve written my own (ultra basic) renderer, collision detector and Math classes. This is, of course, why I chose to use JME3 as the follow up 3D renderer for my objects. That it uses NetBeans is a nice plus, for I started on this platform already.

I am not a trained programmer, my Java is fully self taught, and only stretching so far that I was able to write my own program. It does mean that I was able to read the JME3 library, and I was for instance able to find a way to translate objects I created in my own program into meshes and geometries which I can use in JME3.

The next step would be to project my objects in a real environment. This means that I have to use AR. I found out about ARToolKit and ARMonkey. But the documentation and development only reaches up until March 2010. Because of this all of the examples only contain JME2. Before making an immense number of mistakes, and throwing away “seas” of time because of a complete lack of skill, I figured I’d better ask if ARToolKit/ARMonkey is in anyway compatible or integratable in JME3.

Thanks in advance,



Jesse

Dont know why it shouldnt… I did not look at the API and what kind of data it produces but the general workings of the toolkit don’t have anything to do with the rendering per se, so I dont see why it should not work using jME3. Ofc you’d have to adapt the part of the software where the location is applied to the jME spatials but I guess thats the smallest part of the system :slight_smile:

Cheers,

Normen

Hey, I take it you’ve seen this?

http://hub.jmonkeyengine.org/groups/general-2/forum/topic/reloading-a-texture-30-60-times-per-second/?topic_page=1&num=15#post-106287



@smerten and @greymoth might be able to give you some additional pointers if you ask nicely. I believe they’ve both only worked with jME2 so far though so in truth I’m a tad out of line for asking anything of them, but I figured they wouldn’t mind a subtle mention :wink:

I have seen that post, and initially I wanted to ask my question in that thread, but figured I would be off-topic (I’m sorta new to forums) so decided to start a new topic. But I will approach them (carefully) to see if they would be willing to give me some “tips and tricks”.

Thank you very much, for now I know that it will not take me forever, but realistically it might take me a month :slight_smile:



Greetings, Jesse

jpkirschner said:
I have seen that post, and initially I wanted to ask my question in that thread, but figured I would be off-topic (I'm sorta new to forums) so decided to start a new topic. But I will approach them (carefully) to see if they would be willing to give me some "tips and tricks".
Thank you very much, for now I know that it will not take me forever, but realistically it might take me a month :)

Greetings, Jesse
Excellent. Yeh @jpkirschner you were right in starting a new thread, but keep in mind the usefulness of the "mention" I just did of you in order to subtly direct your attention to this thread ;)

I wish you the best of luck, you know I was getting psyched about a jME3 AR project :D

@jpkirschner Hi. I got your message. I’ll try to help if I can. My situation is basically that after finishing the AR project I was developing ( for work ) I haven’t had an opportunity to continue to use jMonkeyEngine, or in fact to program in Java at all. ( I mostly do web development, professionally. ) But as far as my input is concerned, I’m pretty sure it would be easy enough to get ARMonkeyKit working with JME3. NYARToolkit basically works along side the graphics engine and feeds the 3d orientation transforms to JME. Apart from providing a general framework, the thing that ARMonkeyKit does very well is deal with the video capture and displaying it in the scene on a texture map. I’m guessing, but I think this one step ( writing the video data to the texture ) would pretty much be the main part that would need updating, and the rest would probably just work as is. It’s effectively the only part that directly interacts with the JME api. I don’t know how JME does textures but I assume it’s similar enough that that particular class could be modified without too much trouble.



Good luck. I’m interested to see how things progress…

Hi guys



I’m the developer of the ARMonkeyKit framework and its great that so many people have become interested in it.



I have been thinking about how I would go about upgrading it to run on jme 3. At the moment I’m finishing a project which is based on jme 2 so I won’t be able to do much until that is finished. Also I haven’t got full internet access at the minute as I have just moved house so that is slowing things down.



I keep an eye on this thread and chip in where I can from my mobile internet and be a fair bit more active when I have the internet at home.



Thanks for the interest guys



Adam

Well,



I think I’ll start work next week, but I don’t know if my progress will be worth publishing. My Java is definitely not “clean” for I do not have any professional or even amateur knowledge of programming before I started my art project a year ago.

That does not mean that I don’t think I can make it work. For I am creative. But it’ll take time.



Jesse

Greetings @ajclarkson ! Wow, you AR guys seem to have a sixth sense when it comes to AR related talk going down :S It’s scary, but very helpful.



Best of luck upgrading ARMonkeyKit for jME3, we’re rooting for ya.

@erlend_sh much as I would like to have a sixth sense for discussion (it might make finding solutions easier!) I was actually tipped off by greymoth that this thread was going on. I’ll probably create my own thread when I am in a position to upgrade to jme3 and get some feedback from people who have used it / want a specific feature.