SiteRunner | digital home of MacSlow

From C++ to Haskell…

… is a potentially very entangled step to take. I’m not leaving C++ behind, far from it. Learning a new language “every year” never felt like the challenge I expected it to be. In the past I’ve looked at Vala, C#, Python, JavaScript, TypeScript, Java & Kotlin. For me the most useful appear to be Kotlin (the better Java), Python and TypeScript (the better JavaScript). These impressions greatly depend on the problem domain you have to address of course. For the next undertaking, I wanted something radically different. Since the…read more

Firefox 57 is really fast…

… compared to Google’s Chrome 61.x under Windows and Google’s Chromium 62.x under Linux. Under both operating-systems I see noticeable performance gains on Firefox’ side. It seems Mozilla’s efforts with Rust, Servo and their new rendering-architecture are starting to pay off. Well done folks! I usually do not give much for marketing-talk and prefer to see results with my own eyes in an environment I control – preferably with code I wrote myself – in order to draw conclusions. In recent months I have been diving a bit into the…read more

Fresh from the digital dissection table

To further verify the correct processing of my Cubical Marching Squares-implementation (aka: CMS) – and because I grew fed up looking at my 3D perlin-noise – I have added support for loading raw CT/MR data. There are two freely available datasets from Stanford, hosted at the Stanford Volume data archive. Here is my CMS-library at work on the CThead volume data-set… A handy side-effect is that I have also implemented a viewer for these raw (16 bit, unsigned short) volume data-sets, which allows to easily scrub through all slices via…read more

Baby-Steps with CMS

I’ve managed to finish the classification of all surface-intersections in my Cubical Marching Squares-implementation (aka CMS). As a small show-off, I have added support of displaying multiple iso-surfaces at the same time with different colors… Finally I’ve also started to test some CT- and MRI-volume-data-sets with my CMS. But that’s not fully working yet or rather not up to the visual quality I’m targeting. In the long run, I’ll add a dedicated ray-caster rendering-mode, which is the preferred method for visualizing that kind of volume data anyway. This is so…read more

Cubical marching squares

Posted by SiteRunner in Uncategorized

A brief update on one particular thing cooking in my laboratory at the moment… I’m taking a break from offline 3D-graphics (my path-tracer BeamRacer) to implement my own version of cubical marching squares (aka: CMS) for a stand-alone visualization library, which has to be named still. The versions of marching-somethings I’ve seen outside of academic-paper implementations – in commercial applications in particular – are not very pleasant to look at. Only the games-industry manages to produce clean and elegant visuals, but lacks data-visualization details and precision on the other hand…read more

cairo-clock…

… yes that venerable old desktop-toy from years ago, has finally found a new permanent repository-home again… after enough people poked me about it. I also updated the related project-page on launchpad. In the early days it used to live on people.freedesktop.org/~macslow/cairo-clock (or something like that). Thanks to the wonders of git the whole commit-history is still intact. Looking at that code-base makes me want to redo it all… or update the build-system (CMake or Meson) and move to gtk+ 3.x at least. But maybe someone beats me to it…read more

Updates to ToyShader

Over the last few weeks, I’ve added new shaders to ToyShader. Among the most impressive ones is an interactive 3D-fractal. This shader implements the typical iterative term z = z² + c, but with quaternions instead of the usual complex numbers. Since quaternions are 4-dimensional vectors, one has to cut a 3D-“slice” out of the 4D-body in order to get something meaningful to the screen. Tweak the components of c and you will get different 3D-slices. That’s what’s making this funky animation possible… apart from moving the camera around with…read more

Creative coding

Despite all the trouble on this planet no matter where you turn, there is also some time for the nice things in life… like artful and creative coding. Some recent experiments I did you can find below. Enjoy the eye-candy… Small things that go boom… Click here for a full page view Let the computer paint random stuff… Click here for a full page view A bunch of creative coding cannot go without some WebGL… Share and enjoy! All these should run on pretty much every modern browser/device/OS.

More WebGL

One of the latest experiments with WebGL… Click here for a full page view This WebGL-program does not do any typical lighting calculations for the surface-shading, but instead uses spherical environment-mapping. This variation of environment-mapping is often being used in 3D-applications like blender, Modo, Zbrush etc. to allow very fast shading of the edited scene/object. This technique is beneficial for investigating the surface-features and overall shape quickly, without having to trigger the lighting-simulation offered by a ray-tracer, since it fakes the specular term in a convincing way. In order to…read more