My own Blender Workshop
This is my latest creation (8/24) - sort of building my own Blender workshop to create 3D models. There are a few goals in this exercise:
- Implement everything from scratch, wihtout using libraries as far as posisble, to understand what's going on,
- Implement something that is actually useful. In this case, muy idea is to provide a way to express the 3D model as a compoistion of a series of spans or actions, similar to a driving directions. Will talk more about this in a bit.
- Export the built models using a standard format
No library
Achieved the first goal fully. I was able to cut down my library usage down to minimum. The only libraries I currently use for this are gl-matrix.js (for matrix math in browser), and python Flask (for webserver). I have knocked off numpy, numjs and loads of other javascript and python libraries that I started with.
Geometry is fun
This gave me a great opportunity to implement a ton of geometry primitives, using the python math library and 3D graphics using the WebGL canvas provided by the browser - all from the scratch. That was fun. I'm going to host it soon.
Spans and actions
My idea is to define a 2D or 3D shape as an assembly of series of spans. Each span can be a Pull or Turn of other types. Each type has some parameters. After the 2D shape is built, it is stored a section. A section from the store room can be used for building 3D model using the same process. 3D spans of different types can be assembled together to make a full 3D model. The fully built 3D models can also be joined together to create more complex models.
Export/Import
This is a still a TODO item. Will do export first as it is simpler.
The screenshot below shows a simple 3D spring built using a circular 2D section and repeating a 3D span, which required about 10 mouse clicks and entry of 4 numbers.
