Yesterday (Monday) night I dreamed that the World was reconfigured to work in frequency domain as opposed to time domain !!
This brought some changes. It all started with a centered white spot, plus some extra spots. A bit like when one visualizes an image that has been transformed with the FFT (Fast Fourier Transform).
It was mostly like seeing a cheap sci-fi movie. Not really interesting from a purely scientific point of view. Still, it was a clever dream to have in a sense 8)
I did more research about reading 3DS objects with faces being properly ordered.. and found out that I wasn’t doing anything wrong. The problem is that AutoCAD’s exported files have no sense of faces’ orientation. In order to render those objects properly, one has to render them with faces as having two sides.
That requires some extra rendering time, but also prevents from properly creating smooth vertex normals !
So, I wrote some code to fix the faces normals. The code works on the assumption that objects are closed. For each face, there must be a corresponding one that covers it. With that assumption and lots of ray-tracing activity, I can give the proper orientation to the faces. There are however a few exceptions 8(
Instead of trying to analyze the exceptions, I decided to manually fix those last few faces. The next step is to write an exporter to a common 3D object format (AC3D seems good), so that I can import the processed objects in Blender, modify the faces’ orientation by hand and then export the final objects. Hopefully by tomorrow I can finish that (yeah, right !).
More things to do: continue my mother’s website. I’ve been looking around for a simple BBS script, and it seems that only Japanese care to make simple BBS scripts. I’m planning to download one of those and adapt it to English/Italian.
Finally, I’ll also need to complete the first release of the video-chat app. Dind’t do any work in that sense. Although today I read some docs about neural networks applied to image compression. Interesting stuff, but I don’t know enough about neural networks to even start experimenting.. plus, that’s definitely a distraction, something diametrically opposed to the goal of releasing a working program 8)
Posted by Davide Pasca in Programming, 3D Graphics
