Author Archives: alex

3Dconnexion Space Pilot Pro

Fixing MacOS Login Problems after 3Dconnexion Driver Installation

Posted by on | 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 on | 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

Compass Pro Holding an iPad Pro

On the Hunt for a Great iPad Pro Stand

Posted by on | 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 on | 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 Material Editing

GLTF Support and Material Editing

Posted by on | 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 OSX Screenshot

Shapeflow Update

Posted by on | 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

Tabbed NSDocument-based macOS Rendering

Advanced NSView Setup with OpenGL and Metal on macOS

Posted by on | 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 on | 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

Successful branching strategies and commit policies for SVN/GIT

Posted by on | Featured | No Comments

I remember reading a CVS book back in 2002 or so. It had a quote saying “coding without a versioning system is like parachuting without a parachute”. I always liked this quote as it captured what an essential role version control … Read More … Read More

Panorama

Creating 360 panoramas using PtGui and Affinity Photo

Posted by on | Featured | No Comments

Well, here is something I wanted to do for a long time: create my own surroundings. And the first step for this is of course to create a 360/180 panorama image to use as an env-map. After some unsuccessful first … Read More … Read More