Blender Games in the iDome

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i-dome-carsDalai Felinto has been working on a Game Dome project for the last several months.
Dome Mode in Blender Game Engine.

This feature allows artists to visualize their interactive projects within an  immersive dome environment. In order to make it an extensible tool, we are supporting Fulldome, Truncated domes (front and rear), Planetariums and domes with spherical mirrors.

The support has been added to Blender 2.49. It uses a multipass texture algorithm as developed by Paul Bourke. Briefly, that involves rendering the scene 4 times and placing the subsequent images onto a mesh designed especially such that the result, when viewed with an orthographic camera, is a fisheye projection.

The project was started and  mainly sponsored by SAT – Society for Arts and Technology within the SAT Metalab immersion research program. Paul Bourke from Western Australia University helped with source code samples, general orientations and tests.

Benoit Boilsee reviewed the code, and helped fixing some bugs. Brecht Van Lommel helped with some related BGE bugfixes as well.

A video showing case the tests in iDome:

Blender Games and iDome from Dalai Felinto on Vimeo.

And another video showing the system working in a planetarium kind of dome at SAT.

YoFrankie in a Dome – BGE crazy tests from Dalai Felinto on Vimeo.

The main supporting document can be found here:

Or in Portuguese

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    • Max Puliero

      funny test anyway ! :D

    • Lucio Cavalcanti

      I want one in my house!

      I think I’ll I put it in my living room. Running blender games!

    • Thomas

      This I also seem to remember seeing on blendernation before. I know I’ve at least seen it somewhere.

    • Andrew

      Hey. Just a not on the Yo Franky game. It had a lot of potential, but even so. I don’t think it is anywhere near complete. The controls are so sloppy and the point of the game seams to be missing. The gameplay just kind of stinks alltogether.

    • http://blenderecia.orgfree.com dfelinto

      @Thomas: this is the first time we (Paul Bourke and I) make this document and video public:
      http://local.wasp.uwa.edu.au/~pbourke/miscellaneous/domemirror/BlenderiDome/

      The YoFrankie in a dome video has been in vimeo for awhile though, maybe that’s where you got that impression from. However the implementation wasn’t full developed back then.

      @Andrew: Who cares about playability when you can play it in a dome? (just kidding ;) I have no voice over the game, but I think it was an amazing open project).

    • Kukanani

      this is the future of gaming IMO.

    • NathanWhitaker

      Can they add that 3D effect that I have seen people use in Blender in the iDome as well?

    • http://blenderecia.orgfree.com dfelinto

      @NathanWhitaker if you talking about 2DFilters they are partially supported. Filters that rely on Depth Buffer (eg DoF, SSAO) will not work properly though.

    • NathanWhitaker

      @defelinto: I am sorry but I still relatively new in the 3D graphics field. 2DFilters are like Motion Blur right? What I was referring to was the illusion of the graphics coming off the screen like they do in some of the IMAX theathers or like in Sly 3.

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