Using SceneKit
I want to make the gray transparent box to disappear and only show the colored boxes when the user zooms in.
So I want to detect when that box's edges are starting to fall off the screen as I zoom, so I can hide the gray box accordingly.
First thoughts, but there may be better solutions:
You could do an unprojectPoint on the node and check against screen coordinates, do the +/- math on object size and skip Z. I "think" that would work
You can do some physics based collision detection against an invisible box or plane geometries that acts as your screen edges, has some complexity if your view is changing, but testing would be easy - just leave visible until you get what you want, then isVisible=false
isNode(insideFrustomof: ) - returns boolean on whether it "might" be visible. I'm assuming "might" means obscured by other geometry which in your case, shouldn't matter (edit) on second thought, that doesn't solve your problem but I'll leave it in here for reference.
Hi I'm making a baseball app and I want from users to input strike zone on a grid like this:
How can I build the visual part so that I won't have too much trouble with implementation of a tap gesture recogniser. It'll be great if I can make this resizable so it will look great on many different devices.
With the touch gesture I need to handle so kind of recognizing position in two ways.
In which section the touch was detected.
What are the approximate coordinates inside this section.
This data will be saved on a cloud and can be later used to show the dot on this grid on other devices.
Is there a way to detect touch in a non rectangular shapes? Maybe with Bezier Paths.
Do you have a suggestion how ti appear on screen without using whole grid as a image. I'd rather divide it in Outer grid and the Inner grid somehow and than create all the pieces in each of this grids. 8 pieces in outer and 9 in inner grid.
You can start with UIBezierPath and its method containsPoint:, although this method "does not take into account the line width used to stroke the path." (link), it is also true for UIBezierPath.
Refer further to this article.
I need to be able to interact with a representation of a cilinder that has many different parts in it. When the users taps over on of the small rectangles, I need to display a popover related to the specific piece (form).
The next image demonstrates a realistic 3d approach. But, I repeat, I need to solve the problem, the 3d is NOT required (would be really cool though). A representation that complies the functional needs will suffice.
The info about the parts to make the drawing comes from an API (size, position, etc)
I dont need it to be realistic really. The simplest aproximation would be to show a cilinder in a 2d representation, like a rectangle made out of interactable small rectangles.
So, as I mentioned, I think there are (as I see it) two opposite approaches: Realistic or Simplified
Is there a way to achieve a nice solution in the middle? What libraries, components, frameworks that I should look into?
My research has led me to SceneKit, but I still dont know if I will be able to interact with it. Interaction is a very important part as I need to display a popover when the user taps on any small rectangle over the cylinder.
Thanks
You don't need any special frameworks to achieve an interaction like this. This effect can be achieved with standard UIKit and UIView and a little trigonometry. You can actually draw exactly your example image using 2D math and drawing. My answer is not an exact formula but involves thinking about how the shapes are defined and break the problem down into manageable steps.
A cylinder can be defined by two offset circles representing the end pieces, connected at their radii. I will use an orthographic projection meaning the cylinder doesn't appear smaller as the depth extends into the background (but you could adapt to perspective if needed). You could draw this with CoreGraphics in a UIView drawRect.
A square slice represents an angle piece of the circle, offset by an amount smaller than the length of the cylinder, but in the same direction, as in the following diagram (sorry for imprecise drawing).
This square slice you are interested in is the area outlined in solid red, outside the radius of the first circle, and inside the radius of the imaginary second circle (which is just offset from the first circle by whatever length you want the slice).
To draw this area you simply need to draw a path of the outline of each arc and connect the endpoints.
To check if a touch is inside one of these square slices:
Check if the touch point is between angle a from the origin at a.
Check if the touch point is outside the radius of the inside circle.
Check if the touch point is inside the radius of the outside circle. (Note what this means if the circles are more than a radius apart.)
To find a point to display the popover you could average the end points on the slice or find the middle angle between the two edges and offset by half the distance.
Theoretically, doing this in Scene Kit with either SpriteKit or UIKit Popovers is ideal.
However Scene Kit (and Sprite Kit) seem to be in a state of flux wherein nobody from Apple is communicating with users about the raft of issues folks are currently having with both. From relatively stable and performant Sprite Kit in iOS 8.4 to a lot of lost performance in iOS 9 seems common. Scene Kit simply doesn't seem finished, and the documentation and community are both nearly non-existent as a result.
That being said... the theory is this:
Material IDs are what's used in traditional 3D apps to define areas of an object that have different materials. Somehow these Material IDs are called "elements" in SceneKit. I haven't been able to find much more about this.
It should be possible to detect the "element" that's underneath a touch on an object, and respond accordingly. You should even be able to change the state/nature of the material on that element to indicate it's the currently selected.
When wanting a smooth, well rounded cylinder as per your example, start with a cylinder that's made of only enough segments to describe/define the material IDs you need for your "rectangular" sections to be touched.
Later you can add a smoothing operation to the cylinder to make it round, and all the extra smoothing geometry in each quadrant of unique material ID should be responsive, regardless of how you add this extra detail to smooth the presentation of the cylinder.
Idea for the "Simplified" version:
if this representation is okey, you can use a UICollectionView.
Each cell can have a defined size thanks to
collectionView:layout:sizeForItemAtIndexPath:
Then each cell of the collection could be a small rectangle representing a
touchable part of the cylinder.
and using
collectionView:(UICollectionView *)collectionView
didSelectItemAtIndexPath:(NSIndexPath *)indexPath
To get the touch.
This will help you to display the popover at the right place:
CGRect rect = [collectionView layoutAttributesForItemAtIndexPath:indexPath].frame;
Finally, you can choose the appropriate popover (if the app has to work on iPhone) here:
https://www.cocoacontrols.com/search?q=popover
Not perfect, but i think this is efficient!
Yes, SceneKit.
When user perform a touch event, that mean you knew the 2D coordinate on screen, so your only decision is to popover a view or not, even a 3D model is not exist.
First, we can logically split the requirement into two pieces, determine the touching segment, showing right "color" in each segment.
I think the use of 3D model is to determine which piece of data to show in your case if I don't get you wrong. In that case, the SCNView's hit test method will do most of work for you. What you should do is to perform a hit test, take out the hit node and the hit's local 3D coordinate of this node, you can then calculate which segment is hit by this touch and do the decision.
Now how to draw the surface of the cylinder would be the only left question, right? There are various ways to do, for example simply paint each image you need and programmatically and attach it to the cylinder's material or have your image files on disk and use as material for the cylinder ...
I think the problem would be basically solved.
I have multiple SKSpriteNodes(some rectangles) which are draggable (I followed the tutorial on Sprite Kit Tutorial: How To Drag and Drop Sprites). When a collision happens between them, I group them (by making the one rectangle a parent and the other a child). No matter how many rectangles I will combine, I manage always to have one parent and multiple rectangles that belong to it. I am doing this cause I want to move cubes belonging in a group together and I observed that if I move the parent, I move all of its children. What I am doing to achieve this is to transform the group at touchBegin and to make the touchedNode a parent and all the other nodes of the group children of this new parent. I believe that the following image may make things a little bit more clear.
The problem I am facing is that I can drag the group even if I touch at the white space (shown with red circle) included between the horizontal and vertical rectangles. As all rectangles shown in the image have the same parent, I guess that there is a bounding box that include them all and this is why the white space in the middle can trigger a drag event.
Does anyone have any idea how I can deal with this issue?
Is it possible to have a bounding box as shown in the following image?
Thanks in advance.
You need to write custom hit testing to perform this kind of trick.
For every click -> For every box (within certain range of touch) -> For every other box (within certain range of touch) -> Combine the two box frames into one (CGRectUnion(<#CGRect r1#>, <#CGRect r2#>)) and see if your finger is within the rect.
This might give results for a lot of dispersed rectangles, so limit your initial search of boxes to a given range from the touch itself.
Apart from that it's just simple code.
I need to draw an interactive map for an iOs application. For example it can be the map of the US showing the states. It will need to show all the states in different colors ( I'll get this from a delegate colorForStateNo: ) It will need to allow the user to select a state by touching it, when the color will change, and a "stick out" effect should be shown, maybe even a symbol animated to appear over the selected state. Also the color of some states will need to change depending on external events. This color change will mean an animation like a circle starting in the middle of the state and progressing towards the edges changing the color from the current one to the one inside the circle.
Can this be done ,easily in core-graphics? Or is it only possible with Open GL ES? What is the easiest way to do this? I have worked with core graphics and it doesn't seem to handle animation very well, I just redraw the entire screen when something needed to move... Also how could I use an external image to draw the map? Setting up a lot of drawLineToPoint seems like , a lot of work to draw only one state let alone the whole map ...
You could create the map using vector graphics and then have that converted to OpenGL calls.
Displaying SVG in OpenGL without intermediate raster
EDIT: The link applies to C++, but you may be able to find a similar solution.