Mon Jun 30, 2014
This is a semi-automated backup of my old Tumblr account.
Tubes
06/28/2014
Tubes are easy in Three.js.
Animated version and source code.
FrameRate for lunch
06/24/2014
I’ve been too busy working to post anything during the last two months. I thought this test might be interesting for people doing 3D in Processing.
It shows that using PShape to store your 3D shapes might perform much better than rendering meshes directly. In the examples above you can see that, at 30 fps, I get twice as many triangles using PShape than rendering directly with Toxiclibs. This is due to the retained shapes available in Processing 2, which reduces the necessary amount of communication between the CPU and the GPU.
This link shows how to convert meshes from Toxiclibs to PShape for better performance. If you want textures, you will have to add the uv coordinates yourself.
Playing with shaders
06/15/2014
Draw a white curve. Write a shader to scroll the RGB channels in a continuously changing direction, while darkening the channels at different rates.
Spinning points in 3D with Toxiclibs
06/02/2014
I’ve been working for a month with toxiclibs and somehow I wish it was part of the Processing core. It can make a lot of things much simpler and cleaner.
Sometimes toxiclibs is tricky, because there’s no manual, and the examples don’t cover all areas and functionality. I think using Eclipse is a must, because (among other reasons) it auto import the libraries I need, and it autocompletes using those libraries. Also, the more I use toxiclibs the more I can predict how the unexplored areas work.
The latest binary is from 3 years ago, so I compiled the latest version myself to get a lot of new functionality.
This is an example with 15000 points on the surface of a sphere. I alternate between two modes. One, I rotate the points between 2 planes using CosineInterpolation. Two, I smoothly interpolate those planes to a new random orientation.
As a side note, it looks like video codecs were never designed to encode material of this nature. They completely destroy the small details. In this case, most of the back of the sphere is gone. The positive side of this is that it gives a reason for art installations to exist :)