RageSpline - Create smooth 2D graphics inside Unity Editor - RELEASED

Hello, I've purchased RageSpline for User Interface, but I get some issues with z-culling. It's allright in orthographic projection, but how do I get it to work in perspective projection? I want buttons to be on top of everything in the game world.
Do I need to have a separate orthographic camera and first render to texture and than apply the texture to the main perspective camera?
Or perhaps it's possible to render RageSpline objects to sprites before the game starts?
Thanks.

 

Perspective cameras are not officially supported in RageSpline, but they will work most of the time. The two camera approach sounds like winner to me.

 

There's a NGUI tutorial video (I think it's the "advanced" one) where the author shows exactly how to do this using layer masks, it's close to the end.

 

The 2-camera solution is working perfectly!

However now I have another issue: whenever I reload a level, some of the RageSpline textures turn completely white. Whenever I load the level for the first time everything is fine, but the second time texture goes away. I'm using Allegorithmic Substances for the texture. How can I fix this?

 

I have never used Allegorithmic Substances nor have any idea how it works. Usual error color in the shaders is pink, not white, so it can't be a shader problem. Do you get any console error messages? When you say "load the level", do you mean that you load it runtime or in the editor?

 

@keely
No, I don't get any error messages.
I have a main menu in my game that's made with RageSpline. I load a level in my game (with Application.LoadLevel at runtime), and than go back to the menu. Once I got back half of the textures is completely white.

The substances are supposed to work everywhere just like normal textures.

Everything is looking perfect in the editor.

 

It's a bit hard to help, since I don't have the substances myself, but let's try to narrow it down.

How does one apply the "Substance" on a RageSpline? Do you need to use their shader or are you using one of mine (RageSplineTextured for example)?

Do you have earlier experience on how the Substances work when you use the LoadLevel repeatedly? Maybe they need to be refreshed or something?

Are you using the 3.5 developer preview of Unity?

Can you test if the texture appears white in some other mesh too, that is not RageSpline-powered? That would mean that the problem is not in the RageSpline.

 

I apply the substances just like a normal material, by adding it to the materials list of an object. The shader I'm using is RageSpline/Textured.

Yes I do, and it's perfectly fine.

Nope.

I have the substances applied to some other meshes in my game, and it's perfectly fine.

I've done some more testing and it appears that only SOME materials, that have Ragespline/textured shader applied to them turn white sometimes. It doesn't happen all the time. If I apply some other shader (diffuse) to the object, it starts showing up fine.

So the problem seems to be with the Ragespline/Textured shader, and it happens not with every Substance material.

Here's how my inspector looks in the editor:


Here's how it looks at runtime:


So it looks like the shader is somehow modifying the material. Is that possible?

Thank you in advance.

 

Material is like the "parent" that holds the textures, shader and parameters together. Shader itself doesn't really have any control over anything else, other than the color of the pixels it draws on the screen.

It seems that in your lower screenshot, the texture is just all black. I'm just guessing, but seems to me that the reference to the texture is gone somehow.

When you consider that it sometimes works and sometimes doesn't, it starts to feel like a voodoo to me. I don't know what LoadLevel() does under the hood, but maybe there is some kind of prefab connection in the objects that have problems vs. those that don't? All I can say is that try to find some kind of pattern where it works and where it doesn't. Maybe more screenshots from Substances that work and substances that turn white. Maybe a screenshot form the RageSpline inspector too.

It seems that Unity shaders fall back to default texture, when they can't access the given texture or are not given texture at all. I've set the default texture in my shaders as "white". You could confirm the behavior by doing this:

In /RageSpline/Code/RageSplineTextured.shader line 3, change "white" -> "gray"

If the problematic objects now turn gray instead of white in the LoadLevel(), then atleast we know that it somehow can't reach the texture anymore and is relying on the default fallback. It doesn't solve the original problem, though.

One other thing in your screenshot seems weird to me. It says "Specular (A)" selected below the texture preview image. I have no idea what that dropdown selector does, but what I do know is that RageSplineTextured-shader doesn't even use the alpha-channel from the texture. It only uses the RGB information.

Honestly, I'm still shooting in the dark with this problem.

 

Replacing the value with "gray" in the shader did nothing. However when I replaced the fill color from white in the inspector to red, it turned red instead of white (once the problem appeared).

 

Logically that would mean that the texture still exists, but it turned into all white pixels RGB (1,1,1). I can't figure any other explanation. Doesn't make any sense to me. Or maybe Unity always uses the white texture in some error situation, but I doubt it.

 

Hello Keely,

I purchased your add-on a week ago and I've been very happy with it. I'm still somewhat of a beginner at Unity, but I haven't been able to find an obvious answer to my question yet.

I have a hierarchy of gameObjects with RageSpline components acting as parts of a 2D model with a bone system. Rotating, moving, and scaling in the animation view has so far been a breeze.

What do you think is the best approach to completely change the mesh of a spline in animation? Say I have 20 different RageSplines each representing a different kind of arm for the character. I want to change between different RageSplines for the arm, also legs, torso, etc. I thought of having the RageSplines translated into my own custom text format and saved, and then the RageSplines are modified via script by reading the corresponding text file. This is a last resort because I think modifying RageSplines and updating them with physics every frame could tax performance and is probably not optimal.

I could save the RageSplines as images and tile them in a texture file and then implement an animated texture instead of changing the mesh, but I felt this wastes the potential of RageSplines.

 

Animation isn't really my expertise. I try to get MaDDoX (author of RageTools add-on) to give some pointers on what you are trying to do.

So are you trying to do 20 different kinds of arms with same animation or 20 different kinds of arms with 20 different kind of animation or one arm with 20 different animation frames or... I couldn't really get a clear picture of what you were trying to do.

Trying to refresh lots of MeshColliders per frame isn't really viable performance-wise, but I'm not sure you necessarily need to do that, depending on what you are trying to do in the first place

 

I'll try to phrase it clearer with an example. I drew a character using RageSpline, and the Splines are organized in a bone hierarchy. This way I can rotate the legs and feet and make a running animation. Now the problem comes with the Weapon, for example. I want to change it from a Sword to a Gun. This means I have to change the Weapon RageSpline from sword to gun, and also the Hand RageSplines to make them fit the new weapon. I'm still not sure if I need the physics updated as well. However, this switching happens a lot in animations to supplement the bone system aesthetic.

I want a gameObject to switch between pre-made RageSplines.

One solution I thought of but couldn't implement: I could have a Weapon gameObject parent to both Sword and Gun, and have a state machine that only renders one of the children depending on the state. I'm not sure how to disable rendering for a gameObject, and how much performance this approach costs. If you think this would work give me a nudge in the right direction.

 

This sounds like a solid approach to me. You can disable per-gameObject via the renderer-component like this:

http://unity3d.com/support/documentation/ScriptReference/Renderer-enabled.html

I'm just guessing, but I think the performance hit is very small.

 

I finally figured out how to make SUBSTANCES work with RageSpline. The problem relates to Substances in general, not only to RageSpline. So if someone runs into a problem, whenever the substances are not being loaded properly, check the "generate on load" checkbox.
This should do the trick!

 

Two days ago I've bought RageSpline in combination with RageTools and have had some time to play with it.
I want to thank you and MaDDoX for these awesome tools!

 

Thanks! Please come back to show us if you end up making cool games with them. We'll be happy to promote games made with our tools.

Btw. It's totally up to you, but there is a review box in the Asset Store too.

 

Hi,
Thanks for making the discount, at 25$ it was an instant buy !
-Ippokratis

 

RageSpline is amazing!

But I'm running into a problem when trying to change the color of the fill at runtime. The fill just seems to disappear. I did a quick search and couldn't find anybody else running into this.

Here is a paired down version of the script to highlight the problem.

Code (csharp):

1.  
2. using UnityEngine;
3. using System.Collections;
4.  
5. public class ColorController : MonoBehaviour {
6.    
7.     public Color[] colors;
8.    
9.     private IRageSpline rageSpline;
10.  
11.     void Start () {
12.         rageSpline = GetComponent(typeof(RageSpline)) as IRageSpline;
13.         rageSpline.SetFillColor1(colors[Random.Range(0, colors.Length)]);
14.         rageSpline.RefreshMesh();
15.     }
16. }
17.  

As you can see I'm not doing much. I wonder if it has something to do with the Unity's built-in Static/Dynamic batching.

 

This seems like very basic indeed. I can't spot any errors on your code.

What version of RageSpline and Unity are you running?

Maybe it is a timing thing or something. Try to make a button to change the color outside the Start() and Awake() functions.

btw. doesn't the Start() need to be public? Check if it's even running the code.

 

Ok, found my mistake, had nothing to do with RageSpline. It was just my color was transparent. Sometimes the answer is just staring you in the face. My bad.

 

I have run into a problem with RageSpline when it comes to collision. I need to be able to click on the RageSpline objects and so I set them up as MeshColliders (since box only adds collision to the rim of the object). I put up a bunch of RageSpline objects in my scene and it seems that whenever I hit Play the mesh that it uses for the collision is the mesh of the previous object before I copied it. To explain:

1. Dragged in Blob prefab.
2. Added mesh collision and set the z-depth to 1.
3. Modified Blob.
4. Duplicated modified Blob, dragged to a new location.

When I hit play the duplicated blob have the collision mesh for the first blob, but when I hit a key it suddenly snaps back to the correct mesh. Replaying the scene and the same thing occurs.

 

I tried to replicate this, but I just can't.

Does it matter which RS object is selected when you play?
You say "but when I hit a key", what key is that?
Are you using styles?
What version of Unity and RS?
Can you post a screenshot of your objects inspector?
Do you have means to make a video?

Thanks!

 

Hi,
I wish to modify the RageSplineEditor.cs so I can set the uv rotation and scale via arithmetic values in the editor.
Any suggestions ?
[EDIT]
Nevermind, I just added these three lines of code in line 24 of the RageSplineEditor.cs

Code (csharp):

1.  
2.         rageSpline.SetTextureOffset(EditorGUILayout.Vector2Field(  "uv offset", rageSpline.GetTextureOffset() ));
3.        
4.         rageSpline.SetTextureAngleDeg(EditorGUILayout.FloatField(  "uv angle", rageSpline.GetTextureAngleDeg() ));
5.        
6.         rageSpline.SetTextureScaleInv(EditorGUILayout.FloatField(  "uv scale", rageSpline.GetTextureScaleInv() ));
7.  

 

Hey, new RageSpline owner here! Loving it so far, I've already found a ton of interesting uses for it without having to know too much coding to draw all these things. Love illustrator and I'm considering adding RageTools but we'll worry about that another time.

I'm trying to work out a way to do something here, just searched the net forever and can't really wrap my head around a solution. How can I call up an X/Y point of a percentage into a simple 2 point spline?

I poked around a bit and found GetPosition() functions in the base RageSpline.cs class, which looks like it lets you pass in an int/float to get a Vector3 returned. Is there any way to access these? For example- Say I have a line, and I want to find the X/Y coords of 30% down the line, is there a way to just call GetPosition(percent) and return a vector/point? I would think this could make automated pathfinding very easy to plan out by drawing invisible lines.

I tried going through transform.Find("line").GetComponent(RageSpline).GetPosition(percent), but this seems to not give me access to any functions. Also tried creating a variable and linking the object directly in the editor to the script. Also tried putting everything in the same base directory and other combinations in case of compilation order issues in calling a C# script from JS. I tried dissecting and editing the sample shake class to make that do what I need, and I'm sure I could spend a few more hours creeping around and make it work... It'd just be helpful to be steered in the right direction. I'm newish to unity and definitely understand the concepts of 'what' I need to do to solve this, but not quite the how.

Sorry if I sound a tad delirious- need to catch up on sleep!

 

GetPosition(float) should be exactly what you were after. The range is 0..1 not 0..100% though.

It seems to me, that you are trying to call RageSpline API with JavaScript. That might be the source of any problem you have. I'd love to help, but I have zero experience in Unity outside C#.

Has anyone else done anything with JS and the RageSpline API? Is it possible?

 

Thanks for the quick reply! Yep, I was using a 0.5 as the float but that didn't matter much because it never actually got to that point.

I guess I should finally stop avoiding C#? It's not terribly different from JavaScript from what I can see... And doing a bunch of workarounds to convert to JS will only cause it to be a wobbly mess by the end.

I'll give it a try tomorrow to work in C#. If anyone else has solutions though, I'd be glad to hear them.

 

Atleast if you plan on using the extensions. I think over 95% of them are in C#. Quick Googling on how to use JS vs C# in Unity also doesn't give me very good impression. But then again, I don't think they put JS in there just for laughs. I'm sure it is useful in some scenarios.

 

Is there a thread, tutorial or other piece of documentation that describes how I can use RageSpline in conjunction with the traditional perspective camera? I have my game running in 3D perspective but the UI is something I wanted to handle using RageSpline, but the first thing that it mentions in the video tutorial is that this is not something that is covered in the tutorials.

Little help?

 

RageSpline is a 2D tool and only guaranteed to work with orthographic camera. However, people have made it work with perspective too, it's just not officially supported.

If you are doing UI, depending on what you are after, you might want to consider setting up an additional ortho camera in your scene and render that on top of your game. I think Unity has some kind of example/docs for that somewhere.

 

Google's telling me that the calls to RageSpline.cs should work, as long as I put the C# files in Standard Assets folder, so that they compile first. I tried this earlier but I'll give it go tomorrow sometime. At least now I know I was headed down the right track.

I'm legitimately excited about how powerful this will be once each vertex can be individually controlled and all of these functions can be accessed...

 

If I understand you correctly what I need to do is create a new camera (I call it UI Camera), make it Orthgraphic and put it at a different Depth level from the Main Camera.

Since I want to have my UI rendered last I set the UI Camera to Depth 1 since Unity renders from lowest to highest.

I also created a layer UI Layer on which everything should be drawn for the UI and set the culling for the UI Camera to cull everything except for the UI Layer (i.e the only checkbox is the UI Layer). Similarly for the Main Camera the culling mask excludes the UI Layer.

Now so long as I create all of my RageSpline stuff on the UI Layer, I should be fine - right?

 

Everything seemed fine to me.

 

Yep, It'll work.
We are using the same trick with different RageSpline camera layers to achieve different effects.

 

Hi,

I'm trying to use RageSpline for a new project, but I'm running into a few issues questions:

1. Using the "n" key to switch points between round and square changes the shape of the connector point, but the curve shape does not change, even if I move the point around or move the curve controls. It it was round, it stays round. If it was square, it stays square. I'm using Unity 3.5.

2. I want to create basic shapes like circle, ellipse, rectangle and rounded rectangle using code, and I want to be able to scale them and their effects without scaling the border. For example, create a rounded rectangle with a 4 pixel black border with a red-to yellow vertical gradient fill at 100x50 pixels. Then scale the rectangle to 200x100 pixels, but maintain the same 4 pixel black border and have the gradient fill scale up as well. This is pretty much how they would work in any normal "drawing program".

3. Any chance of basic primitives like the above being added to the API? I can see them being useful all over the place in games.

4. I tried to create a RageSpline in code, but it seems that it is only implemented as a MonoBehavior, and it also expects that there are points in the spline when Awake() is called or I get a divide by zero exception. This makes it harder to work with programmatic splines. Can I create and display RageSplines without using the MonoBehavior class?

5. How do you create a circle, ellipse or rounded rectangle using RageSpline API? I mean what coordinates would you need to place with what values? These would be based on radius or width for circle, width/height for ellipse, width/height and corner radius for rounded rectangles.

6. If you move the gradient fill control over top of a spline point, there doesn't seem to be a way to select it anymore. Instead, it just selects the point itself. This isn't a huge issue for me since I will be mainly creating curves from code, but I can see it being an issue for others.

Thank you,


Ken

 

Hey, keely! Congrats for RageSpline! It's simply amazing!

So, I'm thinking on an endless 2D racing game. Do you know what's the best approach for the endless track with random ups and downs?

Thanks!

 

Hi keely,

Must RageSpline work with RageTools to create gui? Are there any problem if NGUI is used with RageSpline?

Thanks in advance

 

Assuming you mean driving left to right, you could do it with two landscape RageSplines. You can't have more than 180 deg turns with this, though.

To be honest, if I were making an endless racing game, I would just build the track out of small objects like tyres and trees and such. You get much more variation and freedom on how the track is build.

 

Only one potential problem I know of. Both have custom TransformInspector that contradict each other. You can safely remove the one that comes with RageSpline (TransformInspector.cs if I remember correctly).

 

Weird. Any errors in console? Does this happen always?

In order to get that scaling/outline behavior, you need to use the API and hack it yourself. Behavior like that needs a mesh refresh every frame.

For the primitives, you could try the free RageShape that was released by one of the users.

Note: RageSpline is limited to 2nd order bezier splines. No direct support for primitives.

AddPoints(index, position) needs atleast two existing points, because it needs to guess bezier handles from existing curve.

If you provide the handles yourself with AddPoints(index, position, inHandle, outHandle), you should be able to add points to an empty shape, too.

You are correct on RageSpline being tied to MonoBehavior.

 

OK, bought today. Having fun showing my son. How do you get Ragespline prefab objects to lock themselves and not tumble in 3D? For example, a blob object after bouncing once or twice on a rectangle falls off into 3D space ... is there a way to constrain their physics and ignore any z axis physics?

 

Locking Z position and XY rotation is set via Rigidbody component.

 

Hi keely,

1. Are the following steps correct to setup physics of RageSpline?
a. Add an RageSpline object (eg. rectangle)
b. Physics: none
c. Add sphere collider
d. Add rigidbody component
e. constaint position z and rotation of x and y in rigidbody component.
I guess these according to "template-physics game" (without using prefab for simplicity)

However, in your official physics video, you set physics to box collider or mesh collider. Should Rigidbody be needed later?

It seems that for using Physics for RageSpline:
1) Physics: none. Add Collider and rigidbody ourself, or
2) Physics: box or mesh collider. Add rigidbody ourself.

Am I correct? If yes, which one is preferable?

2. In the physics video, mesh collider always have "physics convex" checked. Why not make it checked automatically?

Thanks in advance

 

Depends on what you want. Unity is a component based system. RageSpline, Collider and rigidbody are separate components with their own duties.

To put it simple: RageSpline provides you visible shape, Collider provides you physical shape and rigidbody provides you movement.

However, RageSpline can also automatically set up Collider(s) for you. This is what physics-selection on RageSpline inspector means. You have to always create Rigidbody yourself if you need one.

Alternatively, you can set RageSpline physics=none, and add a primitive collider (like sphere in your example 1). This means that your physical shape is a sphere and it has nothing to do with what the visual shape is.

Also note that Unity MeshCollider is made for 3D objects. When you add MeshCollider yourself manually, it tries to guess physical shape from the visible shape. RageSpline object is flat 2D so this doesn't work. If you want MeshCollider, you need to let RageSpline set it up.

If two MeshCollider collide, atleast one of the needs to be convex. You can't have MeshCollider over 255 verts and convex. That's why I'm not forcing it.

You might want to check Unity physics documentation http://unity3d.com/support/documentation/Manual/Physics.html

 

Thank you for your reply. I understand more and will read the documentation.

 

Is RageSpline going to work its way into Unity core as a result of your shiny new job?

 

Sorry for the long delay. I was on vacation in Asia with very limited Internet access.

For #1, yes, it happens all the time and I don't see any errors in the console. I tried it on my MacBook Pro and Windows machines with the same results.

I'll look into RageShapes...looks like just what I want.

When you say "Behavior like that needs a mesh refresh every frame.", it won't recreate the mesh unless something changes though, right?

Thanks,


Ken

 

In the run-time, you always control the recreation yourself. It will never happen automatically.

 

I'm new in Unity and ragespline plugin. I need a simple script to attach to a object and when it drags the object from pointA a ragespline line stays in pointA (where the initial object is start dragged) and follow the object to pointB (when the user END drag). Similar to unity line render but with ragespline line.

Can you help me?