Author Archives: alex

Moving from OpenGLES to Metal

I used the purchase of my iPad Pro as a welcome reason to finally develop a Metal API backend for my modeler code. I already had OpenGL 3.3., OpenGLES 2.0 and OpenGLES 3.0 renderers so adding a new one wasn’t … Read MoreRead More

Not Shooting Yourself in the Foot – WPF Best Practices

I had been meaning to write this article for a while now. To preface it, let me say I love Microsoft’s WPF! There are some brilliant concepts in it and it is a joy to develop UIs with it. However, … Read MoreRead More

IGES Update

After a couple more hours of work, the IGES importer now seems to work stable. I downloaded a couple of files from GrabCAD for testing purposes and they all seem to work! The only thing that is missing is a … Read MoreRead More

IGES example file

Importer for IGES CAD File Format

Lately, I’ve been fiddling with writing an IGES CAD file format importer. I had written an IGES export a couple of years back so I have some experience with the format and although dated, it is still a widely used … Read MoreRead More

Cubemap Reflections with OpenGL/GLSL

There haven’t been much updates lately but nonetheless, I have been busy! The mesh kernel now has a custom property system which among other things brings support for multiple UV sets and being able to choose if a vertex property … Read MoreRead More

Quick port to iOS

Platform-Independence Done Right – or how to port your code to iOS in a day

Platform-independence is a funny thing: a lot of developers strive for it, although they will never needed it. I’ve experienced this a number of times in my professional life where someone didn’t want to use available system frameworks because they … Read MoreRead More

COLLADA example file

Writing a Native COLLADA Import

The weather this weekend was appalling, so I “muggled in” as they say around here and got a bit side-tracked. For half a year, I have been relying on Assimp – the open asset import library – for loading COLLADA … Read MoreRead More

Selection Highlight

Selections, Highlights and other useful things which are not fun to code

There are certain things when developing an application that are an absolute necessity from a user perspective but which are not fun to develop … thinking about it, that probably is true for all code that is not directly algorithm-related, … Read MoreRead More

Alembic example file

How to Implement Alembic Support on OSX

Granted, this won’t be your typical coding how-to but due to the surprising lack of information on the net, I thought I name this post as such nonetheless. You see, I’ve been trying to add Alembic file format support to … Read MoreRead More

Oculus Rift DK2

Guess what was in the mail today

Well, here it is: My own Oculus Rift. After working with a colleague’s DK1, my own DK2 arrived today. Unfortunately, there is no OSX SDK yet, so all I got to do with it was to try out the Tuscany … Read MoreRead More