The Little Grasshopper

This is the second of a two-part article on tessellation shaders with OpenGL 4.0+. This entry walks through simple Bézier patch subdivision by showing how to render Ed Catmull’s Gumbo model from the raw patch data.

This is the first of a two-part article on tessellation shaders with OpenGL 4.0+. This entry gives an overview of tessellation and walks through an example of simple triangle subdivision.

This post is a follow-up to my previous post on mesh generation with Python. This time I’ll show how to evaluate Bézier spline patches. I’ll also show how to use Python to perform a vertex welding optimization.

Python is beautiful language for generating 3D mesh data. In this entry, I use the pyeuclid module combined with OpenCTM. I explore various ways to generate mathematical shapes, including polyhedra subdivision, parametric surfaces, and rule-based generation.

Amazon has replaced the “Pre-order” button for my book with “Add to Cart”. To celebrate, I created a word cloud of the entire book using wordle.net and a python script.

Pez consists of 1 source file and 1 header file. Like GLUT, it lets you quickly build simple OpenGL apps that will run on any platform. Unlike GLUT, Pez never makes any OpenGL calls on your behalf. Your job is to provide Pez with a render method, an initialize method, and a mouse handler. That’s it!

I wrote a quick-and-dirty X to OpenCTM model converter.

Rvalue references and the new auto keyword are cool new features in C++0x. Now that all platforms support these two features (Visual Studio 2010 on Windows, gcc on everything else), I tried playing with rvalue references to see how they can help us graphics geeks.

Cel shading is a fun way to learn about shaders. This post walks through the development of a simple OpenGL 3.0+ demo for cel shading that antialiases the boundaries between color bands — without using multisampling!

GLSW is a tiny set of safe ANSI C functions that makes it easy to group shader strings into simple effect files. GLSW automatically prepends #line for proper error reporting.

I discuss Lua as a way of organizing GLSL shader strings, with plenty of code samples.