Archives 2008

Working on the IndexedFaceSet support this afternoon and evening (with a birthday party for a friend in the middle).  IndexedFaceSet's are very generic ways of defining face geometry, which makes it easy to hand-edit VRML files with them.  Unfortunately, that generality means they are also rather involved to prepare for rendering, you basically have to ...

Finally got around to implementing smooth movement for OpenGLContext.  Instead of just "jumping" a given distance on each press of the key, the default movement manager will now smoothly interpolate to the position (same for orientations).  Code is pretty straightforward, the only tricky thing was getting holding down the key to make the motion faster. ...

Playing with the OBJ file loader for OpenGLContext this evening (briefly).  Forgot to check in a number of fixes on Friday (oops).  Anyway, as of now CVS OpenGLContext with CVS PyOpenGL can load OBJs from the internet via the (now somewhat inappropriately named) bin/vrml_view.py script.  Still haven't found any samples where there's .MTL files (and/or ...

We picked up a book a year ago that I've been intending to read but never seemed to get the time; "Architectural Theory from the Renaissance to the Present" (Taschen, 2006). Today I wound up with some dead time sitting in offices and got a chance to read through part of the chapter on the ...

Doing a bit of bit-rot fighting in OpenGLContext this evening.  Got the visual shell running again, so that you can load up a world in one window and type commands into another to modify the running world.  Mostly was just updating to use wx 2.8 and the new loader structure.

Also took the time to ...

Have been working on PyOpenGL and OpenGLContext all day.  Have redone the OpenGLContext loader module and ported the OBJ loader from pyglet over.  The OBJ loader seems to work fine, but I didn't find any OBJ files that include material information to test that.  I'm going to have to fix the face-culling, seems that the ...

Have a rather nice older machine here, P4 with a reasonable video card and memory. Should be a kick-arse Linux machine for our niece and nephew. Except that Ubuntu can't seem to see the disks. It's nothing special, Asus P4P800 SE motherboard with an Intel IDE controller. Should be dirt-simple, but the disk is just ...

Nvidia's got a GPGPU library called CUDA.  There's a Python binding.  Thinking it would be interesting to try it out if I can get some time.  It's a C++ wrapper, looks reasonably elegant and seems to integrate nicely with numpy (just going by the documentation).

Not that I actually have anything to do with ...

Felt a little under the weather after a good party (apparently I picked up some soy, which I can't digest well) I decided to learn a little bit about Frame Buffer Objects in OpenGL. These are the new system that allows you to do "off screen" rendering and "rendering to texture" behaviours. Turns out they ...

We went to the last Cafe Scientifique of the season in Toronto tonight.  Topic was a fairly generic "the future of medecine".  A bit disappointing in that the focus was all on the ultra-high-tech possibilities that might or might not show up.  That is, it was all about reactive medicine, rather than proactive.  Nothing substantive ...