##CubeTrip

This started out a experiment with using SceneKit to display some cubes; it is now doing more than that. I keep adding new scenes as try things out.

Experimenting with Scene Kit, Sprite Kit and Swift. This is a proof of concept for some visual ideas.

1. Cubes Some shapes created in at run-time & some shapes read in from a DAE file. It is kind of ropey to be perfectly honest. 😀 It was my first project with learning SceneKit

2. Experimenting with multiple shapes & animating them.

• Actions for rotations are set up to loop in the SCN file for the 3D obejcts in the scene
• A skybox is set at run-time by passing in a array of 6 PNG file names. The star field was created using some open source software.

http://alexcpeterson.com/spacescape/

3. Sprite Kit

• this experiment shows a moving sprite texture with a light node; the texture is using a mask value set in the SK scene file that matches the light node.

Note: ideally, the light node would be tied to the movement of the light wave in the fragment shader. That probably would require quite a bit of re-factoring. 😬

4. Scene Kit - camera movement & object tracking

• create a scene from placing nodes in a SCN file & then at run-time associate .OBJ files for the road, terrain & trees

• a path is created by using the road nodes in the SCN file.

• added some objects to the scene

• there are 2 cameras

• the road & nature objects are from a public domain collection of 3D assets (donations welcome)

http://kenney.nl/assets/3d-road-tiles

Note: this first pass was a good result but it is not very maintainable. Things to do differently.

• Use shape primtives for the objects that specify the node for the road in the SCN file - to be able to see them!
• change the way the 3D objects are attached to nodes; I should check how anchor points work in this context. When rotating the objects; it seems they are being rotated from a corner & not the centre of the object.
• There is a problem with the tree & road meshes having the materials turn on & off. What am I missing?

It took some thinking & experimenting; I got a camera to move with a node & follow the object using scene constraints.