It's alive!

Although in the past few weeks I've been enjoying a holiday, they also have been quite busy. Between having a good time with my family in Louisiana/US and back in the Netherlands, I've also been working on my 3d tool. I have been cleaning up and/or connecting some loose ends: the recently developed components that I mentioned in the previous blog post, are now fully functional within the tool. Here are the mandatory screenshots:


This screenshot shows the timeline canvas widget with two modules (actually, nodes :-) arranged on the timeline. Modules are special nodes, as they appear on a timeline and allow timeline based compositing. Furthermore, the other new addition that is visible in this screenshot is that the performance profiling features that are provided by OGRE3D (the library used to draw graphics on the screen) are enabled.


This screenshot shows a few different widgets in action. First of all, double clicking on a module in the timeline brings up two other widgets: the property inspector (as shown in the first screenshot) and the node canvas widget. The node canvas widget shows an alternative representation of the selected module, and allow you to control it's input properties by adding other nodes and connecting them. In this screenshot, four input properties are controlled by curve nodes, and a fifth one is controlled by a color gradient node. Double clicking on a curve or colorcurve node again brings up two widgets: the property inspector, and a curve editor. Both curve editors are visible in the screenshot above.

I have also been working on a few other features that are not directly visible in these screenshots. They are:

• Saving and loading compositions (nodes, modules, their properties, and their connections) in XML format, the human readability of XML assists with debugging purposes. At a later stage I may switch back to a binary format for loading and saving- however this depends on the resulting filesize(s). Since plain text compresses really well, it remains to be seen if there is an advantage to switching back to a binary format.
  
• Integrating a memory leak detector (visual leak detector [codeplex.com]) which helped with finding the last remaining memory leaks. The tool is now guaranteed to be 'leak free' :-D
  
• Automatic creation and utilization of a 'resource cache'. Scripts, shaders and so on are created once, and subsequently cached in a binary format. The next time that the resource is requested, the cached binary file is used instead of recompiling it.
  

The two screenshots show how the core features of this 3d tool are more or less in place: node ~and~ time based compositing of 3d visualizations in a visual programming environment. However since I am still ironing out some of the nuts and bolts of the tool and framework. Currently there mostly are dummy nodes & modules implemented. Although they do draw something on the screen, they are nowhere near useful enough to create e.g. a demo production. Before I (or anyone else who is interested ;-) can start with implementing more useful nodes, there are a few things left to implement and/or figure out.

• What are the 'bare minimum' of node types that are needed ? Here is a list representing my current thoughts. Most of these node types can be used 'as is'. At least some of these nodes can be subclassed for creating custom content.
  
  
  
  • Scene: This node holds a 3d scene. For instance, when importing a scene from your favorite 3D design program (LightWave, 3DS, Blender), it will be represented by a Scene node. Additional content can be provided by connecting 'scenecontent' nodes.
    
  • SceneContent: can be subclassed to provide content to be inserted in a scene. For instance, the SceneContent node can be subclassed to add a mesh to the scene and adjust or animate its properties (position, scale, rotation). Another subclass could provide a particle system. And yet another subclass could provide generative content.
    
  • Camera: Represents a camera and all its properties, and possibly a camera path. It could be possible to connect this camera to different scenes.
    
  • Viewport: Represents a viewport and its properties (such as dimensions). A camera can have several viewports, but a viewport is connected to a single camera.
    
  • Render: Draws the contents of a viewport either to the screen or an offscreen rendertarget. This node can be subclassed to implement forward and deferred renderers.
    
  • Texture: Represents a texture. Provides input pins such as (u,v) and output pins such as (rgba, r, g, b, a)
    
  • RenderTarget: Represents a texture that can be used to render a viewport to.
    
  • Curve: Represents an animated number value. Already implemented.
    
  • ColorCurve: Represents an animated color value. Already implemented. However since the current implementation requires you to key the r,g,b,a values independently I may rewrite this so that you can keyframe colors instead.
    
  
  
• Some widgets are also required:
  
  
  
  • Camera path editor: this can be done 'quick and dirty' by just showing an editable list of coordinates. Camera paths can be imported from your favorite 3D editor (Lightwave, 3DS, ...) and saved/loaded from the tool.
    
  • Script editor: I want to include at least a basic text editor to edit scripts for shaders, material and so on.
    
  • Information: displays information about the item that is currently under the mouse cursor.
    
  • Shader editor: Eventually I want to include a node-based shader compositor. Even though this is not that much work, it is quite low priority. First I want to get all features listed above to work.
    
  
  
• And finally, to complete my transition from Windows to OSX, I want to switch tool development over to XCode. In theory the framework supports it (no Windows specific components are used anymore), but in practice I must learn a new development environment from scratch- with a project configuration that is a bit beyond the 'hello world' examples found on the internet. I will spend some time each week on making this happen, because after about two decades of using Windows and developing software for it I am extremely tired of it. Even when I am called a fanboy, but that is just because I dont really care what others think of me ;-)
  

There has been plenty of progress, but there also is quite a lot to do! Fortunately all of the above features 'only' require a few hours of implementation each. Meaning, I do not need to make huge changes in the underlying framework code (I think... ;-). So in the coming period I will spend a few hours each week working on one feature, until all of them are done. I plan on having all of them done by the summer of 2011.

... to be continued ...

Happy new year!

After a few weeks of inactivity, here is yet another report of some progress. This is the first of (at least) two major increments in functionality. Have a look a the image below, which summarizes the new features that have been integrated in the editor.



This image shows the following working features:

• Timeline editor (top left): this window allows time-based compositing, which is accomplished by inserting and arranging modules on a timeline. These modules draw some 3d content on the screen. This window supports zoom/pan/undo/redo. All module code is plugin-based, so new effects can be added by copying a dll file and restarting the editor.
  
• Color curve editor (top right): this window allows editing of color gradients that can be used in the animation.
  
• Curve editor (bottom right): this window allows editing of curves that can be used in the animation. A spline (shown in the center graph) and a modifier (shown in the bottom graph) are combined into a final curve (shown in the top graph). By specifying parameters the behavior of both the spline and modifier can be influenced. For instance in this image the modifier is a random value; however it could also be a constant value, sawtooth, inverse sawtooth and so on.
  

This image shows the following incomplete features:

• Node editor (bottom left): this window allows node-based compositing, which is accomplished by inserting nodes and making connections between them. This window supports zoom/pan/undo/redo. Example nodes are for instance: a 3d scene (imported from 3ds max, Maya, Blender), a postprocessing effect such as blur, a render node (either forward or deferred) and so on. Render nodes are also modules - this makes a mixture between timeline- and node-based compositing possible.
  

The editor now has a more or less working skeleton for all the features that it needs in order to be able to orchestrate visualizations. However one major step remains, which is the big one. Up until now the engine only supported timeline-based compositing, with all functionality encapsulated in modules. In the next week(s) this will be updated so that node-based compositing is also supported. This will be a major update; but when it is done the editor can (finally) be used again to make some real, actual productions with!

Happy new year!

More unexpected progress

While my better half was preparing the traditional thanksgiving meal, I made myself useful by indulging in another programming spurt and creating the graphic user interface part needed for 'node based compositing'. I am really impressed with the flexibility of the Qt programming library, and the wealth of examples out there. I started out with an open-source mindmapping program, lobotomized most of it's code, leaving only the code in place that provided a basis for what I want. Then I expanded the code to include Node based interfaces, with Pin based I/O, and added the accompanying graphics widgets for it. After a day or so of fiddling around, here is the result:

The following features are fully functional:

• Wrapping Node based interfaces in graphical widgets,
  
• Wrapping pin based I/O components in graphical widgets,
  
• Selecting, moving and deleting widgets,
  
• Zooming and panning the widget canvas,
  
• Connecting I/O pins based on their value types
  

The following features still need work:

• At the moment you can only add nodes, and not remove them.
  
• It is possible to make cyclic connections. This should be prohibited.
  
• Auto-arrangement of a node and all the nodes it connects to through all its output pins.
  
• Decide on whether I will keep the undo/redo feature, or just remove it. Even though this node editor supports it, it will be a lot of work to support it throughout the entire editor. I think. Or better said: I need to think a bit more about that ;-)
  

Although I had to spend a lot of time refactoring the existing code after I had lobotomized the mindmapping example code, I am still impressed with how quick you can get something like this up and running. In the past I had written a graphic interface like this in Java (to practice my programming skills I spent about 80 hours implementing a digital logic drawing board and processor), I guess that helped a lot with understanding what the existing code did and did not do. But again... unexpected progress!

... to be continued.

Unexpected progress

This post is quite unexpected, as is the development progress that is reported in it. In the last two weekends I had "a few" hours to spend, which of course I spent chatting up a C++ compiler. I am utterly amazed at how fast things have progressed since the previous post: at the time I had only the intentions to start rewriting the GUI of my 3d tool (using Qt this time), but now I can report some real, actual ~progress~. Below is one of those "pictures that says a thousand words".


Basically, I have the following features working:

• Configuration of options, such as which render system to use (DirectX or OpenGL). This is not shown in the screenshot.
  
• Logging subsystem, shown in the screenshot.
  
• Resource inspector, this static list shows which resources (textures, shaders and so on) are currently in use.
  
• Parameter editor, each parameter in this list can be edited using an appropriate editing widget. So if you click on a texture parameter, you will see a list of textures. If you click on a Vector3, you can edit its 3 values. And so on, but you get the idea.
  
• Minor features that have been implemented: load/save dialog, playback controls, texture browser
  

I expected that it would take me weeks (!) to get to this point, in reality it took me 'a few' hours (meaning, I didn't get much sleep in the last two weekends). I got really lucky that I managed to find some really useful programming examples of how to "get things done" using the Qt framework :-)

Next on the todo list is to start working on the timeline-based sequencer/editor (which allows you to place modules, that draw 3d scenes, on different layers of the timeline), followed by the 'node based compositing' part.

(Note: an example of a timeline based sequencer can be found in my November 5th post, in the screenshots for Version 3. Here are two reference screenshots, one of node based compositing in Blender 2.5. I am aiming for something similar. The other screenshot is from ShaderFX and shows how node-based compositing can be used to replace low-level shader programming. In this way you don't need to be a programmer to create 3d animations and/or shaders)


There is a small chance that I will reverse this order, as I have some example code that may help tremendously with creating the node based compositing GUI, and I may be able to use this tool for next semester's 'principles of biological modeling' class. However, I will definitely not be able to work on this in the next 3 weeks, as I am ~swamped~ with end-of-semester work for my graduate study at Brandeis University.

... to be continued!

A brief history of my 3d editor programming efforts...

I wanted to devote one post to providing an overview of the evolution of the 3d editor that I am working on. While engaged in your passion it is easy to lose track of how time passes by. While writing this post it struck me that a number of years have passed since I started working on this editor. Anyway, a rough functional distinction between the various versions can be made:

• Version 1: Using C++ for direct control of the DirectX API, and Microsoft Foundation Classes to create a GUI
  
• Version 2: Using C# to build an engine on top of managed Ogre as a rendering component, and use WinForms to create a GUI
  
• Version 3: Using C++ to build an engine on top of Ogre as a rendering component, and glue that to a WinForms based GUI programmed in C#
  
• Version 4 (in development): Extend the C++ engine to support node based compositing (besides timeline based compositing), and use Qt to create a GUI. Also, this version will be platform independent.
  

The remainder of this post will provide some basic information about each of the versions, accompanied with some screenshots.


Version 1: initial experiments and the beginnings of a game editor

It all started with some simple experiments done in C++ (using Microsoft Visual Studio 6) and the DirectX API, I think version 7 or 8 at the time. I had made a few simple programs which loaded and displayed a 3d scene, experimented with simple generation of landscape meshes and so on. When that went well, I went on to programming more elaborate routines, all of which basically were aimed at speed-optimizing rendering of a large number of triangles:

• Octtree based spatial subdivision, to determine which parts of a scene are on-screen and which ones are off screen
  
• Occlusion culling, to minimize the rendering of triangles that are further away from the camera and will be obscured by triangles closer to the camera
  
• Collecting all rendering operations into batches, and rendering those.
  
• Rendering meshes with adaptive level of detail: the further away from the camera, the less triangles will be used to display the meshes.
  

The screenshot below shows the octtree based spatial subdivision at work:



The screenshot below shows the occlusion culling routine at work. When the view of the city is obscured by a wall (top image) the geometry behind the wall is not rendered. As the camera rises above the wall (center images) more octtree cells containing geometry become visible. The bottom screenshot is included just as a reference to what the city model looked like.



I also built a graphic user interface around these features using Microsoft Foundation Classes (MFC). Below are a few screenshots of this version of the editor...



At this point in time I looked back at what I had accomplished and realized a few things:

• The direction that my editor was going in was more toward a game (level) editor than toward a 3d visualization editor. I did not like this direction. At all.
  
• Even though I thought that programming low level routines for rendering large amounts of triangles was a nice challenge, I did not want to spend my time "reinventing the wheel" as there are plenty of other solutions available. I started considering dropping in an existing open-source 3d engine to handle all the rendering aspects, so that I can focus on creating the editor that allows the workflow that I have in mind.
  
• Developing graphic user interface components in MFC took up a lot of time, more then was necessary. I started to consider switching to other environments that are more friendly to develop your own user interface components
  

Ultimately this resulted in my first complete rewrite of the editor...


Version 2: The limitations of C# and .NET

After some deliberation I had made a few decisions:

• Use existing open source graphic rendering engines. I settled on Ogre3d because of its completeness in features, documentation and examples.
  
• Use C# and .NET for the graphic user interface, because that is what I had experience in.
  

Here are a few screenshots showing the graphic user interface. Notice that most of the panels (as discussed in the previous blog post) are implemented: editors for timeline, scripts, parameters, splines and so on.





The decision to use C# had its good and its bad sides. The good side is that the ideas that I developed for how to structure the engine and the GUI are more or less completely intact in the current version of the editor, and that it did not take much time to implement all of them. The bad side is that I built everything in C#, which included using a wrapper for Ogre. Let's just say that at the time I did not think straight and was not able to extrapolate the limiting consequences of that decision. The most important of which were:

• Because of using a wrapper for Ogre, it always took a while before updates to Ogre were supported in updates to the wrapper code.
  
• The wrapper only wraps Ogre, not all of the additional plugins that you may want to use (e.g. OIS for accessing keyboard, joystick and mice from your code)
  
• If I wanted to make changes to Ogre, I had to make changes to the wrapper code as well.
  

So, after a few weeks of working on this version, I labeled it "a can of worms" and started considering yet another rewrite...

Version 3: trying to mix things that really should not be mixed

For some reason I came up with the idea that I could get the "best of both worlds" by using C# for creating the GUI, while using C++ for creating the engine. I would have to glue those two together using a tool called "Simplified Wrapper and Interface Generator" (SWIG). This part of the process did not take me that long. Finally I had direct access to all the goodies (plugins, examples etc) made available by the Ogre community, while creating custom GUI components was quite easy in .NET. At least that was what I thought... but more on that after the mandatory screenshots below.




While working on Version 2 and Version 3 of this editor, I had enrolled in a graduate study (M.Sc. specializing in Human Computer Interaction) at the Delft University of Technology in the Netherlands. I was lucky enough to be able to use this editor as a basis for my thesis concerning 'patient motivation in virtual reality based neurocognitive rehabilitation'. This proved to be an excellent case study to test my editor and engine. In order to create a game based rehabilitation exercise, I had to finalize or add a few bits and pieces to the engine:

• Saving and loading of engine states,
  
• Sound (using the FMOD library),
  
• Saving and loading of XML files, for data or configuration input and output,
  
• Get keyboard, mouse input to work,
  
• Get Wii Remote input to work, not only to use as a game controller but also used for headtracking,
  
• General robustness of the editor and engine, so that it runs reliably and stable on different computers.
  

The results from this work can be found here [tudelft.nl] (this includes some screenshots of the final game, and a video that shows how patients would interact with the system using pointing and headtracking mechanisms).

However, I realized that there are some major downsides to having the editor/engine code separated across C# and C++. The most important one is that it is quite limiting to not have direct access to engine functionality from the editor. Everything has to be handled by proxy wrapper classes (generated by SWIG). There were several options to work around this, including to generate wrapper code for Ogre myself, re-integrate MOgre, or accept the current limitations. A discussion with the author of Yaose, a script editor for Ogre, pointed me in the direction of the Qt framework for creating GUI's. In my opinion this library is more flexible than C# and WinForms for creating GUI's, it would allow direct access to the rendering engine without the need for creating wrapper code, and as a bonus, it runs on multiple platforms. Since Ogre also runs on multiple platforms, this would mean that in theory, my editor could be configured to run on many different platforms (Windows, OSX, Linux, IPhone, ... ).


Version 4: Doing It Right(er)

So recently I started yet another rewrite. But as with Version 3, it is a partial rewrite and partial extension of the codebase. This time I need to rewrite the GUI, but there is plenty of Qt example code available to get me started (a few days of work on the Qt version got me to the same point as a few ~weeks~ of work on C#/WinForms). Furthermore the engine codebase needs to be extended to allow node based compositing next to timeline based compositing. I am also contemplating setting the codebase up so that the engine can be separated from the underlying graphics rendering framework- so you could directly access OpenGL or DirectX instead of using Ogre as replacement middleware. This would facilitate using the editor for demoscene productions. I expect that version 4 of the editor will be operational and ready to be used in the summer of 2011.

However, I don't have any useful screenshots to show yet... And it looks like that due to university schedule I will not be able to spend much time on programming (if any) in the next few weeks. So the next major update will have to wait until the end of the year...

... but at least, progress is still being made!

:-D

A blueprint for the editor...

... or better said, more doodling during moments of downtime!

Just a quick post to make the results from another brief brainstorm session available for digital eternity. The image below provides a better overview of the individual widgets that the editor (now that I think of it, perhaps 'composer' is a more descriptive naming) must have. I added a priority to each of the widgets, as a small reminder to myself. Without these reminders I want to limit myself from "going off on coding tangents", working on fun stuff instead of what really needs to be done. It may not seem that way, but my ultimate goal is not to create this editor, but to use it to create realtime 3d environment- so that is what I really would want to be working on!



In the few spare hours that I have had available in the past week, I have been working on, and mostly finished, the following widgets:

• 1- The main window, with toolbar, menu and status bar
  
• 1- The 3d preview widget
  
• 1- The information widget
  
• 1- The logging widget
  
• 2- The parameter list widget
  

I am really pleased with how fast this got finished. Qt is a very feature complete and easy to understand environment, with plenty of examples available on the internet to jumpstart your development! Developing these features for the previous version of this tool (with a GUI made using C# and WinForms) took me quite a bit longer- mostly because I had to code all the widgets from scratch since no decent open-source examples were available. And also, trying to get the docking of widgets to work really drove me bonkers at the time. Previously this took a few weeks or months to develop, this time it took me a few hours (this includes the ability to graphically skin the widgets, if necessary).

For all the other widgets, I have created empty placeholders:

• 3- Timeline editor, which can be collapsed to show only a time bar
  
• 3- Node editor
  
• 4- Curve editor
  
• 4- Color curve editor
  
• 5- Material, compositor, shader script editor
  
• 5- Node script editor
  

The timeline and node editor are the 'meat' of this program. Particularly the node editor requires some changes to be made to the existing engine code. The curve and colorcurve editor allow parameters to be animated. The material and shader script editor can be used for real-time editing- so that any changes become instantly visible in the 3d preview (I have found a very nicely done open-source CG and GLSL shader editor, which will be incorporated in this editor when the time comes). The node script editor is the 'icing on the cake'- it will allow programmers to add new effects (in a C++ like language) without the usual compilation cycle. When an effect is working properly, the node script can then be compiled into a plugin that is dynamically loaded at runtime. However, this feature will most likely not make it into the first release of this editor.

Later this week I will post some screenshots from the previous version of this editor (the one made in C# and WinForms), for comparison's sake. That version had all widgets, except for the color curve editor and the node script editor (since it used only timeline based compositing).

First brainstorm...

... and first post!

I've been thinking about creating a general virtual environment creator/editor for quite some time now. Since about 2003 I've been working on various incarnations of these ideas: at first on Windows using Visual Studio 6, MFC and DirectX, then using .NET and managed DirectX, followed by a mixture of .NET for the GUI and C++/Ogre3d for the rendering engine. The last version "kind of works", but I do not like the resulting workflow (in another post I will iterate what works and what does not work). Recently I have been watching presentations and seminars from sceners (mainly Smash/FLT, Navis/ASD) about their workflow, and ofcourse I have been trying out demo editors from other demogroups (e.g. Moppi, Stravaganza, Spontz, Farbrausch, Conspiracy). I decided to start a blog to help me sort out some ideas that I have been juggling around in my brain: I want to restart my coding efforts one last time; but doing it properly this time. Meaning: platform independent, using mature open-source components as much as possible, plugin based, and with a node-and-timeline-based compositing GUI. Below are my first sketches of such a tool:

On this page you can see the initial ideas I had for the editor. The most important doodles on this page are the three views that the GUI presents: node view, timeline view, and tree view. A fourth view, the spline view, was omitted here but will be implemented/ported.

The second page shows two conceptual layouts of the tool: the one on the left shows a spline editor, timeline compositing view, timeline controller (play/pause/loop etc), a 3d preview panel, a parameter editor panel, and an information panel. The right conceptual layout shows where the node compositing view would fit in.

The last page shows a rough overview of the classes that must be implemented in C++. Some of these classes (Item, Parameter, ParameterManager, and so on) already exist and are more or less usable (minor refactoring and optimization needed). Basically the current C++ engine component implements timeline based compositing using modules, which have parameters + parametergroups, that can be animated using splines. Compositions can be saved and loaded into a binary format (this will be extended with an option to export and import XML for debugging purpose). So the engine component 'only' needs to be extended with the 'node based compositing' part, which is what this page is all about.

In the following days I will post some ramblings about the current tool and it's GUI, and the GUI framework that I intend to use (Qt) and some ideas on that. Over the next few weeks I will slowly start the porting process- even though I already have a development environment setup on my Shiny New Macbook Pro and did some compilation tests for the graphics rendering component used (Ogre3d), due to my daytime occupation of being a grad student, in the past few weeks I've not had any spare time to waste. Gone are the days where I could do a graduate study with less than 10 hrs of effort... Sometimes I do miss my >60hrs coding stints ;-)