notes from the bigfug

• (Hopefully) disengaged Twitter from Facebook – seems I was freaking out the majority of my friends with my endless techno-babble… #
• @alpaykasal Hah, good, not just me then Will check out seesmic, thanks for the heads-up… in reply to alpaykasal #
• @OnStageLighting So easy to miss twitter replies, apologies! Had to build my own normals from the geometry but meant I could add smoothing in reply to OnStageLighting #
• Latest press release is almost ready to go out the door, yay #
• Rendering a web page to an image – http://bit.ly/INh67 – could use that in PatchBox to wrap the web onto animated geometry = brain melt #
• Finished sending out proposals, and the initial work on the new Quadratura wiki, now time to do the final hardware checks on the café server #
• Trying to convert fugBlender to a VirtualDub plugin, not so nice… #
• @vj_anomolee Just checked out a few of your iSensorii vids – strange and wonderful in reply to vj_anomolee #
• @awhillas Poor Apache, you ask too much… in reply to awhillas #
• @awhillas Also, did you check out http://cutycapt.sourceforge.net/ ? in reply to awhillas #
• MJ, to quote HST, "Too weird to live, too rare to die", perhaps for the best… #
• The Lieutenants Mistress' latest EP is released for free download: http://bit.ly/eNHkp – oh yeah, proud of them boys! Lewes gig tonight! #
• Good "Friday Cartoons" – http://picturesforsadchildren.com/ #

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June 28th, 2009 | Category: twitter | Leave a comment

• All packed up and ready to go install the hardware for the cafe installation. #
• Covered in dust from sawing holes in the plasterboard ceiling for speakers. Two down, two to go… #

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June 21st, 2009 | Category: twitter | Leave a comment

• Off to the café for projector and camera tests, and lots of measuring to build a 3D model for our video mapping to sit on. #

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June 14th, 2009 | Category: twitter | Leave a comment

It’s an increasingly frequent situation where, having just added some new feature to PatchBox (in this case vector text rendering), it becomes plugged in to a wide range of existing functionality that opens up such a huge amount of possibilities I have to go and sit in a dark room for about an hour.

Well, not quite that bad, but it takes me back a bit.

For example, as the whole of PatchBox is LUA scripted, I bunged together a quick 50 line script that reads the public feed from twitter every 15 seconds and renders the first entry as vector text, seen here with a phong lighting CGFX shader.

I didn’t have to add any extra code as LUA happily loaded some external libraries (luaexpat and luasocket) after I’d copied them into the PatchBox directory, and then it was a simple case of making an HTTP request and parsing the XML.

Pretty basic, but a quick proof of concept and it works!

Thinking it might make quite a fine installation rendering out the real-time twitter feed onto a building using video mapping.

FUN.

Anyway, back to the cafe project…

June 8th, 2009 | Tags: cgfx, lua, PatchBox, twitter | Category: PatchBox, Programming | Leave a comment

It’s well overdue, but am finally getting around to adding font support to PatchBox.  Rather than using bitmap based fonts, I thought it would be fun to use the font outlines and create proper 3D models.  Here’s how it went:

Having extracted the glyph outline using FreeType2, let’s draw it with GL_LINES… ah…

GL_LINE_STRIP isn’t correct either…

Ah, good old GL_LINE_LOOP…

Initially, adding conic and cubic curves didn’t go quite as planned…

Better, but FreeType2 uses long’s to position data, resulting in the rather wobbly lines.

Converting to double’s does the trick nicely…

Now, lets’ fill the outlines using gluTesselate() – oh, FreeType2 uses NONZERO winding by default, whereas GLU uses ODD…

That’s looking better, but there’s still a problem…

Some characters are being drawn weirdly!  Turns out to be a problem with my GLU_TESS_COMBINE_DATA routine.  I’m using a custom vertex format, which I thought was what you returned from your combine callback, but no, you have to return an allocated GLdouble[ 3 ] and remember it so it can be freed later.

The finished result!  All nice and smooth and stored away in vertex array ready for dumping to a VBO…

Next up will be creating a whole string, then multiple lines, then adding depth, colours, textures, etc!

June 5th, 2009 | Tags: freetype2, GLU, PatchBox | Category: PatchBox, Programming | Leave a comment

Some eye candy from the last week’s developments!

June 4th, 2009 | Tags: cgfx, PatchBox, quadratura | Category: PatchBox | Leave a comment

Belle Atmos will be returning to The Fleapit for another full-on audio-assault and visual trickery!

Hope to see you there!

Details and directions

June 4th, 2009 | Category: Events | Leave a comment

• Yum, ordered me some short throw projectors! #
• And a new PC, and a Triple Head 2 Go – I love this part of a project! #
• @alpaykasal Oo, QID looks like fun. Will check into those. Fortunately only need 3 outputs for this job in reply to alpaykasal #

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June 4th, 2009 | Category: twitter | Leave a comment

• New “Monkey Island” game, yay! Could never be as good as the first two… http://www.telltalegames.com/store/talesofmonkeyisland #
• Lost in an ugly intermittent framebuffer timing issue! Nasty! #
• Hah, new it wasn’t my code! Latest NVIDIA OpenGL 3.0 madness… #

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June 3rd, 2009 | Category: twitter | Leave a comment