After adding FBX support the other week, there was yet another reason to finally add support for normal and specular maps. While it’s still not physically-based-rendering but a simple Phong lighting model, it’s still a nice improvement to the overall image quality and helped developing some further multipurpose code.
Blog
Adding FBX Support
FBX has gotten quite a high adaption rate over the years. I had shied away from adding support for it because there is no official spec, only unofficial bits and pieces like the document the Blender foundation published a while ago. There is the official FBX SDK but it is in binary form only. However, it seemed to be the most viable option to be able to handle all the different versions the format had over the years.
Setting up TRAC on macOS
For those who haven’t heard of it yet, TRAC is an open source combination of a ticket and a wiki system mixed with version control integration written in Python. It’s great for organising work especially in small to mid-size development teams but due to the large number of plug-ins and its incredible plug-in API, one can even customise it to cover other aspects of a business. I had meant to write a blog post about it for a while, mostly as a cheat sheet for myself or as a reference to point others to. Since I had to move my personal TRAC to a new machine it is the perfect occasion to write it down for once. So here goes …
Second update video on tessellation posted
The second instalment in the dev update videos has just been published. In the last couple of weeks, work has mostly been focused around improving the tessellation quality and algorithm robust with some nice results. ISO-lines are now weighted higher than trim curve tessellation which results in a much nicer topological flow.
Monthly Status Update Video
There hasn’t been much news lately as we have spent the time on improving tessellation quality and optimizing low-level NURBS functionality. So instead, here is the first in a monthly series of videos that will keep you in touch with what is going on inside our operation. Enjoy!
Simple Ground Shadow Baking
Shadows add a lot of realism to renderings. After having done a lot of internal refactoring and ground work for future features, I wanted to add something that improves the image quality but doesn’t delay too much from the actual topics I have to work on. Hence the idea of adding a simple, pre-baked ground shadow.
Reading the Depth Buffer in Apple’s Metal API
I have been working on a feature that requires reading the depth buffer and storing the data in an image. While this was quickly done in the OpenGL-based renderer, I struggled getting it to work with the Metal-based renderer. Things got weirder and weirder … until the source of all problems presented itself as a single missing line of code! … Read More
Anti-Aliasing Shaders
Somewhat surprisingly, even in an age of retina displays aliasing is still an issue. Writing the stripe light shader was easy enough but creating an anti-aliased version took some research. It’s actually quite easy once you get your head around the principle.
Building boost locale on iOS
There are three main aspects in the Core SDK where boost is used: XML parsing, file system and unicode handling. Getting boost to compile correctly for iOS is already something that requires some custom sh scripts but getting “locale” (the library that does unicode handling) to compile is a headache for many people on the net. So here is a summary of all the problems and the final solution on how to compile boost (V1.61.0) for iOS with locale support using the iconv library.
PLMXML Support
Question: What is procrastination for software developers that do geometry processing? Answer: Writing importers apparently … I had some spare time and didn’t want to tackle the next big feature so I implemented yet another format: PLMXML. … Read More