Your Panda3D Magazine 1 (1/2022)

Hey there, I’m excited to deliver this very first issue of Your Panda3D Magazine to you. I don’t know how this new magazine will be doing. Hopefully well, because if there is interest in it, I’ll be glad to be publishing more issues on a regular basis.

So, what will you find in this issue? First, we’ll be modeling a UFO in Blender. I’m planning to make a step-by-step Blender tutorial like that in each issue. This column will be called Model of the Month.

Next, we’ll see how to bake textures from materials in Blender so that we can later use them in other software, and in particular in Panda3D.

Speaking of which… In the next article we’ll learn how to export the model from Blender in GLTF format and then load it in Panda3D.

We’ll make use of the UFO model also in some of the following articles. One of them is the article on position, rotation and scale intervals, in which we’ll create an animation. Then, in the article on encoding the window output into a video we’ll see how to capture the screen in Panda3D and create a video in MP4 format.

In the GUI column we’ll see how to integrate the Kivy framework in your Panda3D application using the panda3d-kivy add-on by Cheaterman. We’ll use our UFO scene in this article again to demonstrate how you can steer the flying saucer from the GUI created in Kivy.

Finally, in the Science Corner column, we’ll be talking about gravitational acceleration and we’ll make a simplified simulation of a freely falling object that needs a different amount of time on different planets and other space objects to touch the ground.

You will find all the files that you need, including the assets used in the magazine, on Github. Here’s the link:

https://github.com/prospero-apps/Your-Panda3d-Magazine

I really hope you’ll like Your Panda3D Magazine. I will be grateful for any feedback from you. What do you like?  What don’t you like? What would you improve? Maybe you have some Panda3D-related ideas that you would like to read about in the future issues of the magazine.

There’s also a companion video to this issue that you will find at https://youtu.be/R-lXatHB96c

You can contact me via e-mail: prosperocoder@gmail.com. You can also leave a comment on my blog or on my YouTube channel below the article and video respectively that are related to this issue. Enjoy reading.