Components and Configurations
3DVIA Studio uses components to describe the characteristics of templates and actors.
Components can be thought of as types of objects like “3D”, “behavior”, “light”. In 3DVIA Studio you have the following built-in components:
3DVIA Studio components 2D 3D Behavior (*) Camera Characters Input Devices Lights Nature Particle System Physics Shaders Sound Sensorial User in Interactions Video
(*) Behavior components are special because the user can create as many types of behaviors as he or she wants (i.e. there is not a unique type of behavior). See the Behaviors chapter for more information.
Other components might inherit from the list above. The chapters 3D World, 2D World, Nature, Sound, Video, Artificial Intelligence, Immersive Virtuality, Physics, Particle Systems are dedicated to explain all the 3DVIA Studio built-in components.
Component Instantiations
Components can be thought of as types of objects or classes. In computing programming terms, this would mean that a component is like a blueprint used to create objects of a particular class type. The blueprint describes the state and behavior shared by all the objects of the class. The objects created from the blueprint are then referred to as instances. In other words, each time the blueprint is instantiated (used to create an object), an object is created.
Actors and templates are or result from component instantiations. However, we will often speak of component to mean the object resulting from a particular component instantiation because the component describes the resulting object. This way, we can say that actors and templates result from component instantiations and are described by components.
You can use 3DVIA Studio built-in components to create actors and templates. Some assets (like 3D and templates assets) will also create components upon import.
Assets & Components
You can use assets to create component instantiations.
The resources contained in the asset are then used as data by the resulting component instantiations. That is, the resources provide values for the component characteristics of the resulting instances.
These creation values are referred to as default values.
Component Configurations
Once instantiated, components can be configured.
Configuring a component means customizing the value of one (or more) of its characteristics, with respect to the default creation values.
These default values are defined by the asset used by the component. If one of the component’s characteristics is configured from within 3DVIA Studio, then the configured value overrides the default value. Furthermore, configured values are asset-independent, which means that the value is preserved even if the asset is reloaded or has changed in the meantime.
Configurations will allow you to develop your experiences in a collaborative manner, by keeping track of your authoring customizations while your assets are being edited by other members of your team.
You will come across the concept of configuration very often in 3DVIA Studio. Actors, templates, assets can all be configured in the way described above.
Also, configurations are instance-specific, that is, instances can be configured individually and independently of each other.
Aggregations
Components can then be assembled together so as to describe rather complex objects:
For example, assembling a 3D component and a physics component gives place to a physicialized 3D element described by these two components: a 3D component (for the 3D characteristics) and a physics component (for the physics characteristics). We then say that the element (actor or template) is made up of these two components.
Every component can be configured individually.