Ambilink

Ambilink enables the use of Blender for controlling the direction of ambisonic panning in a DAW. It consists of two plugins connected via IPC (using the nng library):

VST3 Plugin - performs ambisonic panning up to fifth order (ACN channel ordering, N3D/SN3D normalisation). An object from the Blender scene can be picked in the GUI, the panning direction during real-time playback is then given by the current position of the object relative to the active camera. When rendering audio to a file, the plugin's output is synchronised to the animation in Blender.
Blender add-on - provides data about the Blender scene to VST instances via IPC. In real-time mode continuously publishes updated camera space coordinates of objects with at least one subscribed VST instance, in offline rendering mode sends coordinates for each frame in the animation.

This allows to tie any instance of the VST3 ambisonic panner to any Blender object, the position of which can be controlled by any means available in Blender - keyframe animation, drivers, scripts, etc.

Note This project has been created as a Bachelor's thesis for the Faculty of Information Technology of the Czech Technical University in Prague. This repository also includes the thesis and it's LaTeX source.

VST Plugin

The VST3 source code is located under code/vst/projucer_project/Source.

Building

Warning The build system doesn't currently work on Windows and macOS (see next section).

The VST is developed using C++20 and the JUCE framework. Some functions from SAF and GLM are used. The build system uses CMake and conan.

To build and install the plugin, run the following commands:

> cd code/vst
> ./install_dependencies.sh # clones git submodules, installs .deb and conan packages (some conan packages may be built locally)
> conan build . -if build # builds the project and git submodule dependencies

Warning the install script currently only supports Debian-based systems.

Non-linux builds

The C++ source itself is multiplatform (although some minor changes might be required for compiling with MSVC or Apple-Clang).

However, the build system is not currently fully set up for anything except Linux. The SAF library requires to be linked with a library compatible with the CBLAS and LAPACK standards. On Linux, OPENBLAS is used, but this part of the build system is not set up for Windows or macOS, where other libraries, providing better performance should probably be used (see this section of SAF docs). This is the main, but not the only issue with the build system that would have to be solved to make it work on Windows/macOS. Pull requests are of course welcome.

Blender add-on

Installation

The Blender code/blender/addons/ambilink directory may either be directly copied to Blender's add-on directory, or added to a ZIP file using the code/blender/zip_up.sh script, and installed via Blender's add-on settings menu.

License

The software is licensed under GPLv3.

The JUCE Framework is dual-licensed under GPLv3 and a proprietary license. The framework itself is not distributed with the project and is consumed as a GIT submodule.

Other third-party libraries are used either as GIT submodules, or conan packages. For git submodules, the licenses can be found in each submodule's respective repository. For conan packages, the licenses are copied to code/vst/third-party/licences when dependencies are installed.

deivse/ambilink