/ARKitSample

Primary LanguageSwift

after banging my head a bunch on ARKit, i figured out that:

  1. ARKit supports the .dae format with animation but at application build time. There is an implicit conversion/optimization to allow .dae -> .scn behind the scenes. The scripts and stuff are apparetly at /Applications/Xcode.app/Contents/Developer/usr/bin/scntool
  2. Although we can support .dae files, pulling .dae files at run-time are not entirely possible for ARKit. Reading a bunch of blogs, the easiest thing seems to be that we should convert the .dae -> .scn and upload it on S3 or somewhere and then use it to render it on ARKit, which works BTW. However there is a problem that conversion from .dae -> .scn loses animation. I'm sure there is a way to enable animations. This doesn't seem like a bug deal. Big deal seems to be loading of the model, which works when downloading models in .scn format and once the object is loaded into memory, the scenekit animations could be applied.

I will try this in Unity, but my suspicion is that if we get into asset management, we will need some kind of transformation pipeline, as one of our interview candidates mentioned. I have my sample application at https://github.com/code-sauce/ARKitSample with main code around https://github.com/code-sauce/ARKitSample/blob/master/Pulp%20Fiction/ViewController.swift#L40