Payton 3D SDK

Payton is a general-purpose 3D Software Development Kit. Simply, a 3D Programming Playground!

Payton is a playground. Kickstart any idea fast and easy, grow it.
Create tools for the next step. Create map editors, small animations, small algorithms or artificial intelligence for your game. Whenever you need to try a new idea, don't bother to create a new application with all the details. Payton comes with all the necessary defaults and that is what makes it unique. Almost everything has a pre-set.
Game engines and other libraries are way too complex and it takes a long time to start the initial playground.
Payton never intends to take place as a game engine or a full-featured 3D environment. There is already plenty of stuff for that purpose.
Tools programming is easy.
Easy to visualize what you want to achieve or do what you want to do.
You can move forward from Payton to any other place if you like.

We draw 2D graphs and charts in reports and we generally understand much more easily when we visualize the data. But in some cases, visualizing exceeds 2 dimensions. We require to have third and even fourth dimensions. (And on top of those, the definition of the fourth dimension as time can get foggy in terms of relativity.)

Payton gives you the ability to extend your graphics into 4 dimensions. It is not software but a software development toolkit/library built with Python. This will give users the ability to read real-time data from sensors, cameras or any other data sources in realtime and visualize them in real-time. The data source can be a thermometer, a random number generator, a toy car connected to a speed sensor, a map, a vehicle port or anything that generates time-based 3D data. Furthermore, it can be a time-based formula. As this can get too complex, software with that complexity will probably be too hard to use and understand where Payton is designed to be as simple as it can be. So easy to program that a newbie can kick-start it just by following the tutorials.

Contents of this Document:

Payton 3D SDK

Features:

3D Math Library
Various base geometries:
- Cube
- Cylinder
- Triangular Mesh
- Plane
- Lines
- Particle System
- Sphere
- Dynamic Grid
Clean default scene.
Pre-defined keyboard-mouse and camera controls
Pre-defined environment
Clock system for parallel tasks and time based operations
Simple collision detection
Optional Physics Engine
- Basic support for Bullet Physics. to be extended
Extendable controllers
Pre-defined lighting with shadows.
Material support
Clickable objects and virtual planes
Shader support
Basic GUI Support
- Window
- Panel
- Button
- EditBox (Multi-line support)
3D File formats:
- AWP3D Animated High-Poly 3D Object
- Wavefront OBJ
- Quake 2 MD2 with Animations
Mesh Generation Tools
- Extrude Line in 3D
- Rotate Line around an axis in 3D
- Fill between lines
Mesh modifiers:
- Merge Mesh
- Subdivide Mesh
Extensive examples for every feature

Install

Requirements:

LibSDL2 sudo apt install libsdl2-dev for debian/ubuntu based linux distros. For other platforms, you can see your favourite package manager.
imagemagick sudo apt install imagemagick for debian/ubuntu based linux distros. For other platforms, you can see your favourite package manager.
Python 3.7+
A Graphics card that supports OpenGL 3.3+

Install using Pip:

From a bash terminal:

pip3 install payton

This should install all dependencies. If you get any permission errors, you are probably installing the library to system-global so missing some permissions. If you do not want to use pipenv or virtualenv, then you might want to run above command as sudo pip3 install payton

Optional Bullet Physics Integration

Payton supports Bullet Physics at a basic level for solid geometries.

pip3 install pybullet

Once bullet physics is successfully installed in the same environment as Payton, it will automatically be activated and you will be able to use basic properties of it. Check out the relevant examples.

Optional GTK3 Integration

Instead of SDL2, you can use GTK3 (along with all nice GTK3 widgets) with Payton.

You need to install Python GTK3 Bindings.

AWP3D Format and Exporter

AWP3D is simply a ZIP file with every frame as Wavefront object. To export your animated Blender objects, you can use the exporter add-on here:

https://github.com/sinanislekdemir/payton/tree/master/plugins/Blender%202.8-2.9

Using Payton with Anaconda

As of version 0.0.10, Payton is installable on Anaconda. From Anaconda Prompt:

pip install payton

Is sufficient to install Payton and it's dependencies on Anaconda.

Payton will be available to use with Spyder or JupyterLab on local.

Upgrade to the latest version:

Payton is under active maintenance. This means I am spending some time to fix the bugs or make it better. So you might want to upgrade it occasionally.

pip3 install payton --upgrade

should do the trick!

Getting Started

Your first code

from payton.scene import Scene

scene = Scene()
scene.run()

This will create your first empty scene and show it inside an SDL window.

Controls

Key / Action	Description
Mouse Wheel	Zoom In - Zoom Out
Right Mouse Button Drag	Rotate Scene
Middle Mouse Button Drag	Pan Scene
Escape	Quit Simulation
C	Change Camera Mode (Perspective / Orthographic)
Space	UnPause / Pause Scene Clocks
G	Show / Hide Grid
W	Change Display Mode (Solid / Wireframe / Points)
F2	Previous Camera
F3	Next Camera
H	Open / Close Help Window

Environment variables

Some options can be configured from the environment variables.

SDL_WINDOW_WIDTH: Set window width.
SDL_WINDOW_HEIGHT: Set window height.
GL_MULTISAMPLEBUFFERES: Set OpenGL multisample buffer count for antialiasing. (usually 1 or 2)
GL_MULTISAMPLESAMPLES: Set OpenGL multisample sampling count for antialiasing. (usually 1-16)

Without GL_MULTISAMPLEBUFFERS AND GL_MULTISAMPLESAMPLES, you may notice pixelated graphics. There is no default set for those values because they can vary between graphic cards.

Examples

Personally, I don’t really read the long descriptive documentation unless necessary. I like things simple and self-explaining. Therefore, instead of writing long documentations, I write simple examples to use each feature of Payton without digging much into the internals.

Examples can be downloaded from Payton Github Page.

You can either download the whole repository as a zip file or you can just git clone it.

Tested in Windows 10 Paperspace, seems to be working as expected

Supports pyBullet solid geometry physics

Example Index

Basic Examples
Mid Level
High Level
- Multiplayer
  - Server backend for a multiplayer game
  - 3D Blocks building game multiplayer

Contribution

Please keep using type hints in the main library.
Type hinting can be ignored for examples.
Example codes should be plain and simple.
Every new features should include sensible defaults.
- Nothing should be too verbose to use.
Make sure that make check is clear before pushing your code.
Running isort . is not mandatory but highly encouraged.
Ever new feature should have an example code.
There is a reason why some methods are longer than they should and complex.
- To reduce code jumps and stack switches.
- To run faster.

Screenshots and Videos

Examples Showcase:

Some free-thoughts and decisions:

I've choosen to use List[float] type for Vectors because:

I needed something mutable. Otherwise, the number of memory copy and swaps would be too much. So, I've crossed out Tuple and NamedTuple.
dataclass has an overhead to convert to C-type floats and arrays in memory.

So, to gain some performance, I have created the main library with a risk of non-strict vector lengths.

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