alex, Author at metashapes.com

X-Ray Shader Using Metal

Posted by alex on October 19, 2021 | Featured | No Comments

While fake x-ray shaders are not very practical, they do look nice and are easy to implement. I did neither find a nice one I liked nor a good explanation, so here goes: The vertex program simple computes the screenspace … Read More

SRTM Elevation Data

Posted by alex on October 16, 2021 | Featured | No Comments

I’ve been looking into free digital elevation models (DEM) and the source most mentioned is NASA’s Shuttle Radar Topography Mission (SRTM). The resolution is roughly a data point every 30 meters which would have been fine for what I wanted … Read More

Fixing MacOS Login Problems after 3Dconnexion Driver Installation

Posted by alex on May 5, 2020 | Featured | No Comments

So I had a scary moment the other day: I hadn’t used my 3Dconnexion Space Pilot Pro in a while and suddenly had a need for it. For good measure, I thought: let’s update the drivers since it’s been a … Read More … Read More

Multi-Body Mesh Editing

Posted by alex on January 5, 2020 | Featured | No Comments

The Mesh-Editing Mode in Shapeflow3D finally comes to live! This is a major breakthrough that required a lot of work under the hood but opens up a lot of possibilities. Let me explain: … Read More

On the Hunt for a Great iPad Pro Stand

Posted by alex on June 19, 2019 | Featured | No Comments

MacOS Catalina will bring one feature I’m pretty excited about: Sidecar, the ability to use your iPad as a second screen. I’ve got this awesome iPad Pro that even neatly fits the screen of my MacBook Pro 13″ size-wise, but … Read More … Read More

View Frustum Manipulation to Produce Overdraw

Posted by alex on July 23, 2018 | Featured | No Comments

This one belongs to the chapter “it’s the small things that count”: On a number of occasions, the area of user input is not the whole render area – or in other words – the render area is larger than … Read More … Read More

GLTF Support and Material Editing

Posted by alex on July 18, 2018 | Featured | No Comments

Recently, I’ve spent some time improving the material system. The main motivation for this was to get support for Physical Based Rendering and importing files in the GLTF format. Here are the first results: … Read More

Shapeflow Update

Posted by alex on April 15, 2018 | Featured | No Comments

I haven’t written any updates on Shapeflow itself in a while. The problem with developing a framework instead of just an application is that one often has a long stretch where no real progress is visible in the user interface. … Read More … Read More

Advanced NSView Setup with OpenGL and Metal on macOS

Posted by alex on March 14, 2018 | Featured | 1 Comment

I have been tweaking the UI code for the macOS variant of Shapeflow over the last couple of days. It’s surprisingly difficult to get rid of all the kinks and quirks. Two interesting aspects were how to get on-demand rendering … Read More … Read More

Update of SVN/GIT policies

Posted by alex on March 12, 2018 | Featured | No Comments

Over the last couple of months, I got some great feedback on my article about SVN/GIT policies. How to use a VCS “correctly” seems to be a hotly debated topic in pretty much every company and there are lots misconceptions … Read More

Author Archives: alex