Posted by Bruno Oliveira, Software Engineer
As developers, we all know that having the right assets is crucial to the
success of a 3D application, especially with AR and VR apps. Since we launched
Poly a few weeks ago, many developers have
been downloading and using Poly models in their apps and games. To make this
process easier and more powerful, today we launched the Poly API , which allows
applications to dynamically search and download 3D assets at both edit and run
time.
The API is REST-based, so it's inherently cross-platform. To help you make the
API calls and convert the results into objects that you can display in your app,
we provide several toolkits and samples for some common game engines and
platforms. Even if your engine or platform isn't included in this list, remember
that the API is based on HTTP, which means you can call it from virtually any
device that's connected to the Internet.
Here are some of the things the API allows you to do:
List assets, with many possible filters:
keyword
category ("Animals", "Technology", "Transportation", etc.)
asset type (Blocks, Tilt Brush, etc)
complexity (low, medium, high complexity)
curated (only curated assets or all assets)
Get a particular asset by ID
Get the user's own assets
Get the user's liked assets
Download assets. Formats vary by asset type (OBJ, GLTF1, GLTF2).
Download material files and textures for assets.
Get asset metadata (author, title, description, license, creation time, etc)
Fetch thumbnails for assets
Poly Toolkit for Unity Developers
If you are using Unity, we offer Poly Toolkit for
Unity , a plugin that includes all the necessary functionality to
automatically wrap the API calls and download and convert assets, exposing it
through a simple C# API. For example, you can fetch and import an asset into
your scene at runtime with a single line of code:
PolyApi.GetAsset(ASSET_ID,
result => { PolyApi.Import(result.Value, PolyImportOptions.Default()); });
Poly Toolkit optionally also handles authentication for you, so that you can
list the signed in user's own private assets, or the assets that the user has
liked on the Poly website.
In addition, Poly Toolkit for Unity also comes with an editor window, where you
can search for and import assets from Poly into your Unity scene directly from
the editor.
Poly Toolkit for Unreal Developers
If you are using Unreal, we also offer Poly Toolkit for
Unreal , which wraps the API and performs automatic download and conversion
of OBJs and Blocks models from Poly. It allows you to query for assets and
filter results, download assets and import assets as ready-to-use Unreal actors
that you can use in your game.
Credit: Piano by
Bruno Oliveira How to use Poly API with Android, Web or iOS app
Not using a game engine? No problem! If you are developing for Android, check
out our Android sample
code , which includes a basic sample with no external dependencies, and also
a sample that shows how to use the Poly API in conjunction with ARCore. The
samples include:
Asynchronous HTTP connections to the Poly API.
Asynchronous downloading of asset files.
Conversion of OBJ and MTL files to OpenGL-compatible VBOs and IBOs.
Examples of basic shaders.
Integration with ARCore (dynamically downloads an object from Poly and lets
the user place it in the scene).
Credit: Cactus wren
by Poly by Google
If you are an iOS developer, we have two samples for you as
well: one using SceneKit and one using ARKit, showing how to build an iOS app
that downloads and imports models from Poly. This includes all the
logic necessary to open an HTTP connection, make the API requests, parse the
results, build the 3D objects from the data and place them on the scene.
For web developers, we also offer a complete WebGL sample using
Three.js , showing how to get and display a particular asset, or perform
searches. There is also a sample showing how to import and display Tilt Brush
sketches.
Credit: Forest by Alex "SAFFY" Safayan
No matter what engine or platform you are using, we hope that the Poly API will
help bring high quality assets to your app and help you increase engagement with
your users! You can find more information about the Poly API and our toolkits
and samples on our developers site.
