Carnival and Qt

Hey there!

Brazilian Carnival happened from 02/21 to 02/25. Among very other things, Carnival is about creativity, happiness and so on...

As a traditional geek and confessed NERD, I hate Carnival - although I do appreciate very much the hole days - and had spent some time learning about Qt.

As I said before, to transcribe glut/freeglut to an OO approach is an Herculean task... and albeit that statement, looking back at my classes, that is still my feeling: I'm reinventing the wheel.



So... I'll stop at my paused development to study Qt a little more. Thank God I've found a good tutorial about it.

Incomming Stuff

I'm a little away from here, but I did'nt give it up.

Currently I'm encapsulating small portions of some useful "gl" functions like:

• glLight and glLightModel = (clsLight, clsSpotLight, clsLightModel)
  
• glMaterial = (clsMaterial)
  

After reviewing my errors, the above classes are behaving nicely. About the errors? Well, It was actually bad timing when activating the OpenGL state machine.

I'm also working on camera views and developing a default rendering framework to actually model the Cryptex.

I'll post the classes when the "framework v1.0" is minimally debugged.

It works!

My fault was to start from complexity. I designed a "powerful" class that acctualy did nothing. Yes, I know, sounds lamme and stupid, but when you mix, C++ programming, computer graphics and rigorous software engineering, sometimes the ground disapears bellow your feets. It just got too complex.

The bellow sphere was hard corded, and it works.


That makes me think that I must review my failed attempts, with lots of overloading, constructors, pointers, etc.

Lighting is hard

Well,

I'm having a hard time with lighting. I'm developing a clsLight to deal with basic issues, but for some unknown reason I'm letting something slip through my fingers.

Lighting seems to be a "dark" place to one adventure himself. Albeit the large number of OpenGL tutorials into the Internet, I'd not found anything deeper than "the lit sphere" cases...

My time on Cryptex 3D is becaming scarce also, as some professional duties are taking precedence over it.

tplVector

I've looking for code snippets for a while. Today I've found "Snipplr", a on-line source code repository, and it came to solve my code posting needs.

I've coded tplVector, a template class with nice operator overloading to deal with vectorial arithmetics.

Code snippet - tplVector on Snipplr

On the beginning there was only darkness

I'm a little stucked on lighting because the normals; then, Analytical Geometry there I go...

I've found the Paul's Online Math Notes and it had helped me a lot with my revision. Ok, to be honest I did not get too deep into it, just vectorial stuff needed to understand normals, cross products, etc.

After some reading I've developed a template class (tplVector) with nice operator overloading to deal with vectorial arithmetics and so on. I'll post it here later after some more debugging - it looks stable, until now.

Bellow, I hope, the last of non lit snapshots:



This colorful effect can be obtained by setting the glColor (vertex by vertex) to the same values as the vertex coordinates (Red = x, Green = y, Blue = z). How? OpenGL interpolates the missing colors from the given vertexes color data.

cryptex.org

Today I got my share of Robert Langdon's paranoya...

I opened my e-mail box at morning as I usually do every day, expecting to pick up the good messages among the ton of junk/spam/pishing that the filtering had not grasped.

My average new (good) e-mail count is toward something like 20 or like (not so much for most people standards, I know). Today I got just one new e-mail, from nobody less than Justin Nevins - the artisan that model real cryptexes for sale - from cryptex.org.

Damn... I've just started out this stuff. How did he find me? It must be some kind of conspiration...