![]()  June 21st, 2016: Cydonia Solstice Milestone
I'm done with the White Room. It's completely functional in terms of mesh editing. It can give finishing touches to the geometry of meshes, fix small problems like parts of objects for which the normals are pointing in the wrong direction, and of course create/edit materials and paint objects. It still lacks a series of "stock" materials, some clean up to the code, and of course it has no mean to save or load stuff you edit, because it wouldn't make sense without a back-end server. BUT, this concludes the desired functionality for the whole demo. And now I can switch the project to alpha stage and begin developing the back-end server. I think it'll be fun. Not the development, I mean, the result. I think it's gonna be fun, I now really believe it has potential.
Here's the last demo (this time for real):
http://anynowhere.com/personal/next/solstice/demo.html
And here's a small collection of OBJ models from the present and past scenes to get you going with experiments in the White Room. You can of course create your own things and experiment with those, but these are pretty ready and probably enough to get an idea of what's possible to do in the White Room:
http://anynowhere.com/personal/next/solstice/models.zip
Tip: to create a credible transparent object, other than painting it with a material for which you have switched on the "transparency" flag, you need to "calibrate" the object's parts. Calibrating means estimating the cross-section width of the polygon mesh, from side to side, for all surfaces. It's implemented with a series of ray-triangle intersections, and there is no other way to get the exact results we need. The price of it is that it's slow, but it's also a one-time operation. When we'll upload a model to the server, its calibration profile will be stored and will not need be recalculated. To calibrate a part of the model, you need first "triangulating" that part, which - in 3D modeling jargon - means to convert all its non-triangular faces to elementary triangles. The triangulation function is in the side menu: click on the part and click "triangulate". When you've made the object transparent, triangulation will give access to the "calibrate" option. You'll see the result of calibration is that it enables the "scattering" parameter to kick in, darkening the edges of the mesh proportionally to their cross-sectional width. Think to a piece of glass, say a flat panel of glass: the edges of the panel will look much darker than the flat surface of the panel. That's because light has to travel and bounce back and forth between surfaces inside the piece of glass, i.e. it gets "scattered" around. The thicker the cross-section, the darker the edge.
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