I know there has been alotta 3D text posts around here lately, but it has been a good challenge and learning experience, so deal.

This time  though I’ve stepped into a new language: Python.

Anderson Miller and I are colaborating on our final for GLART: rendering the web (or maybe just wikipedia) in a 3D universe. (more…)

I struggled last week trying to find the right shape for all the wine data to build around. Eventually I settled on a cylinder… and was somewhat pleased, but then I showed the app to a fellow student and they suggested making it into a 3D wine bottle; and I said “Yeah, that makes sense.” So here you go… the wine visualization from last week using processing and openGL, but now in bottle form.

Alas, text again.
That ok though… I like type, and I would really like to make it easy to do 3D geometric type in opengl. So this week in GL Art I made another stab at fonts in 3D. Initially I wanted to automate the entire process of getting the font file into opengl, but I hit a wall when it came to making triangles out of the font outlines. I’m sure there is something out there that would help with that bit, but I don’t know it, so I moved on. The next best thing I could think of (more…)

For some reason, this week I just wanted to make something that looked cool. I have been doing a lot of ‘interface’ stuff and thinking about functionality… so I was hankerin’ for a change of pace. Luckily the data set for this assignment is all about frivolity; wine… more than 5,000 different bottles to be exact, were given to us, along with all their metadata. (more…)

So I think I have my idea for the GLArt final… 3D WEBPAGES…
Rendering, and somewhat exploding webpages dynamically into a 3D space, links still working, images 3D’d and everything. I am especially excited about 3D typography. (more…)

Last week’s Visualizing Data was all about the grub, or ‘larvae’. As mentioned earlier in my Larvae! post, this week is the first time we are working with a large, structured, data set (xml). The first thing I had to do before I could get to the visualizing part was get all the data into my app nicely organized. Luckily enough I scraped together a few simple routines to make that happen. HERE is a link to a processing sketch that simply gets the data from the HUGE (>5bm) xml files and quickly draws the paths and gradients to the screen.

After that, twas all about making a tool to explore the boring old xml data. (more…)

Last week in GL ART the topic was textures… you know those images that wrap themselves around 3D models and video games… neato-keen.

There is much more to textures than I expected, and that mostly has to do with performance issues, i.e. allocating memory for the textures on the the GPU. So, because I really wanted to understand that aspect of openGL, I figured I would try making a texture from live video, since I would have to change the memory out often and such. (more…)

I am excited about the assignment in Visualizing Data for the next two weeks because it is working with ‘real’ data; that is, data that someone (a scientist) worked really hard to capture, and cares about. There is something really nice about displaying data for someone where your work could actually help them see their work in a new light. (more…)