Mega Book - Easily create working 3D books Comics

@Drowning Monkeys - Did you get a chance to make a test project?

 

@SpookyCat I sent it to you over email, did you not receive it?

 

No, if you submitted a support ticket and didn't include an invoice number then we don't get the email, I believe it says a few times on the support page that an invoice number has to be included.

 

Hey,

i would like to insert text inside the book on a page. I´m using the "Super Text Mesh" Asset to get a TextMesh. But all i got is this error.

NullReferenceException: Object reference not set to an instance of an object
MBComplexPage.GetMeshData(UnityEngine.GameObject obj) (at Assets/MegaBook/Scripts/MBComplexPage.cs:107)

Does MegaBook only works with "Text Mesh Pro"?

EDIT:
Same Error with "Text Mesh Pro". Can anybody help me please? I need a simple word on one page in the book.


Thanks for your Help.

 

@t-schulz - If you could submit a support ticket at our website we can help you out.

 

i have wrote a mail yesterday with invoice number.

 

is anyone experiencing a problem with MegaBook as of 5.4f3?

I make a new book, open mesh options, and the book breaks. The pages bend in all kinds of weird ways that is not desired behavior.

 

@Drowning-Monkeys - Not seeing any problems here with 5.4f3 and not had any support tickets, do you have the latest version?

 

@SpookyCat v1.38

How can I debug this? I mean this is crazy weird.

EDIT - This is happening cuz I'm scaling the book. Which leads to another question, I've tried making the book bigger by using Page Length and Width, but TMPro doesn't sit as well on the pages when you make the book bigger this way. What is the best use for putting TMPro text onto the book pages? I'm using MBComplexPage, as described in the video

 

I found a fun bug -

Let's say you have a 10-page book, and you add some page objects on page 1. If you change the number of pages in the book, the page objects that were normally on page 1, for example, will now be on page 11 (or beyond)

EDIT -
so, it seems like this can be fixed by adding pages to reflect the number of pages + 1, then deleting the last page. For some reason, as you add pages, it says index out of bounds, but after you delete the last page entry everything goes back to normal.

 

Have you got the Fill Book option checked?

 

how would that affect page objects? (not dynamically created pages)

 

If you could submit a support ticket at our website with some images showing your settings in the inspector and outlining the steps you are taking so we can see what the problem is. You don't say how you are adding objects to the pages, if you are using the mesh content system then there is an option to say just fill all the pages repeating the content so I was just guessing that might have been what you could have done from the info you posted.

 

@SpookyCat okay i'll do it. Also - in the meantime, I simply can't get masks to work. I've tried all kinds of masks to see if maybe my masks were too subtle, but I don't get any effect from using a mask at all.

 

Okay, so after some experimenting I see the problem - and I have to say I disagree with the implementation of the backgrounds/masks.

So we have two different ways to make 'backgrounds' for pages, the 'pages' tab, or the 'Texture Backgrounds' tab.
The mask only seems to apply to the textures that you have added in the 'Pages' tab. Which is strange to me.

For example, I'm making a custom book, where each page will have the same, custom background. I want to add a mask to this background (which I can do in photoshop on the texture itself, instead of in your app, but still), but the only way to get a mask is to add a background to each page individually. Seems like there should be a flag here.

 

@SpookyCat is there an easy way to click on a page and trigger a next page event? or do I need to add a canvas to every single page? (so, if there were 100 pages, i'd need to add 100 canvases). I was thinking hypothetically that I could simply add a collider to the entire book, and process the collision as a next/prev page click, as long as another interactive element hadn't been selected.

 

@Drowning-Monkeys - Again if you could submit a support ticket we can help you out, we keep not getting notified of new posts in the threads on the forums, it is much better if you submit a support ticket as we can track what has and has not been dealt with.

 

Quick update to fix the latest round of depreciated method warnings.

Changes in v1.39

• Update for the latest depreciated methods etc in Unity.

 

Just submitted an update to the Asset Store and our website, this changes brings firstly a small performance boost of 2 to 3% in the Page Deform code, and we have also added MultiThreaded support to the asset which you can turn on by checking the 'Multi Thread' option in the Inspector, this will also bring a useful boost in performance for any platform with multi core support. MegaBook is also fully Unity 5.5 compatible as well.

Changes since v1.39

• Small optimization to the page deform code, 2% to 3% reduction in CPU time.
• Updated to allow multi threading of the page deforms for multi core devices.
• MegaBook made fully Unity 5.5 compatible.

 

Hi!

I have a big problem using MegaBook.
All MegaBookBuilder changes I'm doing in the inspector are lost after scene reload.
Initially, right after creating a new MegaBook using "Create Other/MegaBook" it seems the settings are stored. As soon as you reload the scene, any changes you do from now on are lost as soon as you reload the scene again.
I am not doing anything fancy, just changing some basic MegaBook mesh options like page length/width and so on.
There is also no error message.

Is this a known bug ?

I'm using Unity 5.5.1p2 and MegaBook 1.41

 

@BitMatrix - Seems something has changed in 5.5.1 if you can submit a support ticket at the website I can help you out until I can get an update submitted.

Edit: Actually the solution until I can do an update is quite simple just change something else in the scene, for some reason in Unity 5.5 setting an object as dirty from a custom editor script no longer marks the scene as dirty, so until I can submit an update just change anything else on any other object. I guess this has not been reported as most users will be changing various things in a scene at a sitting not just items in the book component.

 

@SpookyCat - Thank you for the fast response. I tried the solution you suggested and it works. As soon I change anything else in the scene Unity marks the scene as modified, I can save it and all settings for my book are also saved. Now I can continue to work on my project

 

Just submitted a small update to the Assetstore that makes MegaBook fully Unity 5.6 compatible.

Changes in v1.42

• MegaBook made fully Unity 5.6 compatible.

 

Hey there, apologies if this question is answered somewhere. Does anyone know if MegaBook lets you turn more than one page at a time? I'd like to create a book that lets you skip like 10 pages without seeing the content on those skipped pages - kind of like turning a chunk of the book so you can find a bookmark. I can't seem to find this capability in the docs, but maybe I've missed it?

Thank you

 

well when you set the page number (in code or the editor), it flips through all the pages in "turn time" seconds, that seems like it would be what you want. You can also set the book to snap to the page instead of flip.

 

Hi DM, thanks for replying. It sounds to me like snapping to the page would skip the animation of the book turning, is that correct? Ideally for my purposes there'd be an animation. Flipping through all the pages doesn't sound ideal for me as I don't want the player to see individual pages turning, just a chunk of the book at once - unless it's so fast you can't tell how many pages are turning at a time?

Cheers

 

I was also wondering if anyone knows how easy it is to implement something in MegaBook where the page turn follows the cursor, similar to this asset? https://www.assetstore.unity3d.com/en/#!/content/77222

Is this behaviour already an available option or would it require an amount of coding?

 

Excuse my ignorance, I'm a complete newb when it comes to programming. No clue at all.

I assume that is supposed to be added into the MegaBookControl.cs right?

The question is, where? the first part of this is already in the MegaBookControl.cs and the rest I have no clue where to put it because I don't fully understand the brackets placement.

Also: I purchased MegaBook a couple days ago to develop a series of unique (as in never seen before) paper planes books.

I could build my book, set everything so it looks good and doesn't take too much CPU (100 pages) and even tried building and running from unity.

All goes well besides the scripted book controls. Which look totally misaligned and tiny in all of my devices. Here's a pic.

There the only two things I did was to make the slider larger and the buttons too. Put the main problem remains, the controls are tiny and aligned to the right. In my Samsung S6 is so severe they're microscopic.

 

Just submitted a small update to the Asset store, this makes MegaBook fully compatible with Unity 2017. We also added the option to set the Light Probe, Reflection Prove and Motion Vector options to the page meshes generated by MegaBook.
We also have had a couple of emails asking whether it is possible to attach Unity GUI objects to pages, that is easily doable you just need your canvas set to World Space mode and adjust the Canvas scaler params to get the GUI to appear at the right size and pixel density you need. After that you just attach the GUI objects the same as you would for any other game object.


Changes since v1.42

• Added option to set the Light probe use by page meshes
• Added option to set Reflection probe use by page meshes
• Added option to set Motion vector use by page meshes.
• MegaBook made fully Unity 2017 Compatible

 

I'm stuck at a point, which seems to work flawlessly in the demo video, but not when I try it:


I've used the MB Complex Page component and linked two Text Mesh Pro pages in the Dynam Mesh section, as shown in the demonstration. The smaller green Text looks great, I'v configured the size and offset and it bends well with the turning page, but the larger red text, doesn't bend as nicely, it either interesects the page, clips through the whole book or hovers too far above the page.

Is there a way to increase the bending resolution of the Dynam Mesh in this case or any other solution to my problem? I'd like to include bigger text and images on my pages, but so far they've been clipping through.

Thanks in advance!

My own answer: I found, that it's possible to extend the MegaBookDynamicMesh class and modify the mesh data of the glyphs to increase their resolution. Worked well after looking into the provided examples.

 

After using MegaBook for a while, I'd like to write up some feedback, because I think the asset has a lot of potential but needs some more love from the developer.

Positive:

• It looks good. Bending animation is nice.
• Lots of settings to control the look and feel.
• Nice integration with Text Mesh Pro or use of textures as pages.
• Generally, good concept/design, should satisfy a lot of use cases.
• Object system and working with pages is good.
• API has what I want, source code included and there are extension points (like subclassing MegaBook classes for custom page sources etc.)

Negative:

• Undo doesn't work in the inspector (not sure if broken or not implemented, or only partially)
• Lots of controls work, but are tedious to edit in practice. For example the Transforms for front and back cover are locked by the book system, so I can't edit them by moving in the scene, instead I have to type in values like 0.001 or 0.002 to nudge my model up and down. This would be easily fixed by either using a global scale factor (something like defaultBookWidth), to bring the values back into a nice range and also by supporting two-way editing from handle and inspector field.
• Very unstable in the editor. First I had an issue, where my almost empty scene grew to over 1GB in size, because I was using some option that puts a texture on every page, but somehow it was bugged and copied the texture thousands of times (bug report submitted for this one, although hard to track, because I couldn't reproduce what caused it exactly). Next, I often have editor freezes, when I change any value in the book builder. Usually performance is ok and everything works, but sometimes the editor just freezes up, after changing the page slider. When this happened once, it keeps happening until I reload the scene.
• The documentation is not completely up to date or things don't work as expected. For example, there are animation curves labeled Turn 0 to 7 when I have 6 pages. When I change them, I can adjust the way the turn animation bending happens, which is nice, but when I hit rebuild, those settings are cleared out and reset to default. Some options are not explained, like "Use UV2" (I could look up in the source code that this means "Copy the UV2 information from the dynamic mesh content to the page object").
• The support system (bug tickets etc) is very annoying and maybe doesn't even work. I've submitted multiple reports, but sometimes I forgot to add my purchase ID and tried to send a second message to the developer, but I don't think they received my reports in the end. Please improve this. Maybe customer accounts which enfore the purchase ID or similar.

I currently don't have much time to create reproduction projects for the mentioned bugs, because we're close to a deadline, so I just wanted to leave some feedback, it's meant to be constructive, I still like the asset.

Edit: I found a potential workaround to the editor freeze bug. Don't create a prefab from the book. After disconnecting the prefab, the freezes appeared to stop.

 

Quick question: for attaching objects to pages, does it matter if they're scene game objects or project prefab objects?

 

If you're using Dynamic Mesh with Fill Book turned on, how does that interact with the Pages options? Is having Edit Pages optional? If you only want to override the last page's options, would you need to add blank edit pages for all the other pages first?

 

Tumbleweeds...

 

Just a quick note to say a new version has been submitted to the asset store which makes MegaBook fully compatible with Unity 2018.1 and 2018.2

Changes in v1.46

• MegaBook made fully compatible with Unity 2018

 

@bradbecker - Sorry for some reason Unity does not always send me emails for posts on forums, it is much better to use our support ticket system on our website for help or issues.

 

Why still not the 1.46 version available on the store since Tuesday ???
6R

 

Not sure, it is still awaiting approval from Unity is what is says on my control panel. I have emailed asking what the delay is but no answer as ever.

 

Seems there was an issue with the review process and MegaBook got stuck, it has been passed now.

 

Yes... Thanks.
But there is an issue with the last version in Unity 2018 :
When you add several objects on a page THE LAST ONE doesn't become invisible at the right moment any value you are using...
6R

 

Hi, has anyone tried using MegaBook in a VR project? I'm having issues when using TextMeshPro for dynamic pages. Everything seems fine but when I play it for testing only the book and the pages' background render, not the text mesh

Unity 2018.2.14

 

There should be more examples in this asset.
I'm mostly putting objects per page, because the dynamic mesh always end up popping when I change pages (giving the page more depth seems to make the trick, but it still feels floaty).

 

I'm trying to set up a GUI that allows the book to turn to a specific page based on where the audio is. Basically, I have a read along book but it still allows you to turn pages to which ever page you desire one at a time, and I want to add the ability to click a button that returns you to the page that the audio is currently on. I'll have to time the audio myself and do a coroutine wait for seconds to change the value of the current page i am on, which i can do. I just need a button that changes values which in turn changes back to the current page. So in short, after ten seconds i want my button, but only when clicked, to turn to page 2, and in 20 seconds i want the button to turn to page 3 only if clicked. etc etc. I've used the "public void SetPage(float page, bool force)" but this just snaps to the page, i want the button to flip the book back to the specified page that I have set. so if i'm on page 50, and the 20 seconds has passed, as stated above, and i click the button, it flips the book back to page 3 not just immediately snapping to page 3. Thank you!

 

@Onlysmiles If you can submit a support ticket at our website we can help you out.

 

Two problems using Unity 2019.1.8f
Assets\MegaBook\Scripts\MegaBookBuilder.cs(189,9): error CS0246: The type or namespace name 'ReflectionProbeUsage' could not be found (are you missing a using directive or an assembly reference?)

Assets\MegaBook\Scripts\MegaBookBuilder.cs(193,9): error CS0246: The type or namespace name 'LightProbeUsage' could not be found (are you missing a using directive or an assembly reference?)

 

An update as been submitted to the Asset store that makes MegaBook compatible with Unity 2019, should be available very soon.

 

Is there a way to create prefabs ?
Any prefab instantiated at runtime doesn't have any pages.

 

If you tell the book to rebuild after you instantiate it then that will sort that out. Also the latest update making MegaBoook compatible with Unity 2019 is in the Asset store now.

 

Couldn't find the function, which one is it ? Is it in the MegaBookBuilder class or where ?

 

Just set the 'rebuild' bool on the MegaBookBuilder component to true, ie:

MegaBookBuilder book = newObj.GetComponent<MegaBookBuilder>();

book.rebuild = true.