This video shows the first test of our new MegaBook system for Unity. This asset allows you to quickly and easily build full books or comics with complete control over the number of pages, and the page turning effects etc. You can ask the system to generate the page meshes for you or you can select to use your own page mesh so you are not limited to rectangular pages.
You have complete control over how the pages animate as they turn, how far they turn, where they turn and the radius of the turn, so it is easy to turn up just the edge of the pages to get a flip book effect etc.
Another video showing the various options available will be out soon and the system will be in the Asset Store and on our website very soon. More information can be found at our website www.megafiers.com
Added a new video showing some of the features of MegaBook which has been submitted to the Asset Store and is also available now on our website.
Video showing how to add complex mesh data as content.
This will be a standalone system. You will be able to ask the system per page to either generate a mesh or you can select a mesh that will used, so you could every page as a different shaped mesh if you wanted. The mesh will need to have enough vertices to allow the various bends to work nicely though.
Hope to submit to the store next week, though already had a fair few feature requests so would like to get some of those in but should still be submitted next week with the usual 3 or 4 days for Unity to review and approve. If you have any ideas though please do share and I will see what I can do. Price is yet to be decided but it certainly wont be our most expensive asset
I was wondering about the memory management, for example my RPG will have a book of about 150 full artwork pages, something like Ni no Kuni manual, all will appear in game in the home level of the hero
I still have not implemented it in game, i only have a placeholder book i made in blender with a simple page animation and just a few pages in a rigid manner (no new page appear)
Do you offer a memory/asset management handle for the book ? For example will it free memory as new pages are loaded in a dynamic way, since 150 HD pages would be too much for any system if not managed well. Of course i could implement a manager or extend your pack, but if it was included would be a very nice addition
So would you be streaming in textures then? If so it is a trivial matter to have the book created with no textures set for some pages and then just set or change the textures for a page or change its material as the texture becomes available. Or if you are building the page texture via render to texture or other means again it is a simple call to change the texture on the page.
I was thinking about a more total solution, like just add the page textures in the editor and have the asset manage the streaming/loading and memory management.
I can easilly change the textures in the material through scripting, but managing the streaming and memory for these textures is the problem that would take time to solve
That is certainly something we can look at, it is very simple to do using WWW.LoadImageIntoTexture or direct texture file loading and a data path, naming convention etc
That would be great, plus would make your book a total solution with all required to get a full book going in an optimized way, which would greatly add to its value imo
Looks pretty cool. A nice feature would be the ability to import one of the eBook formats and automatically build the pages from that dynamically. I’m thinking of things like RPGs where you might actually have a bunch of “real” books that you wouldn’t want to have to store images for.
You can, if you have Pro do render to texture and use that for a page content. We are also going to be adding support for some of the mesh based text systems so you can build content that way. Support for ebook file formats would be a nice feature, I will add it to the wish list.
Yes it is Tetsuo in the comic example, well spotted.
I’m assuming if I purchased this from your store, that this asset would be entirely disconnected from AS, correct? There’s no way to transfer the purchase license based on the way Unity handles fees and such?
That is correct, and as you suggest there is no way to add people to the asset store customer database. The system should be on the Asset Store quite soon as it was submitted 4 days ago.
Submitted a new version to the Asset Store which brings a new feature of being able to add hard front and back covers to your books, there is a new section at the bottom of the Book Builder inspector that opens up the cover options and you can select the objects to use for the front and back covers, as well as alter the angle the covers turn through and define the pivot location. When Tony (the Artist brother) is back I will do a video showing the system in use but until then the demo scene book has hard covers on so you can try it out. You can off course point the system at a bone transforms if you happen to have a skinned book cover, which would allow you to have nice look at the cover hinges for example.
