Random Etc. Notes to self. Work, play, and the rest.

Posts Tagged ‘opengl’

W(e are )here: Mapping The Human Experience

In Processing, Weblog on 14 April 2008 tagged exhibitions, opengl, Processing.org, stamen, trulia hindsight, Videos, Work with no comments

Eric is in Minneapolis at the moment talking about our work at the University of Minnesota. The talk has been in the works for a while but nicely coincides with W(e are )here, and exhibition we're participating in organised by Solutions Twin Cities.

We've prepared a special version of Trulia Hindsight for the show, using the experimental version of Modest Maps I made for Processing in February and animating data for around 1 million homes using OpenGL. We're not ready to distribute the data to a wider audience yet, but here's an example animation from the application:

Trulia Hindsight - Twin Cities Edition from Stamen on Vimeo.

Thanks to Jamie from Trulia for getting us the data we needed to present Trulia Hindsight in this way.

New Processing Hack: Line Caps and Joins in OpenGL

In Processing, Weblog on 9 February 2008 tagged 2d, Graphics, java, opengl, Processing-Hacks, Processing.org with no comments

One of the sad things about using the OpenGL rendering option in Processing is the lack of control over line weights, caps and joins. This week I allowed myself to get distracted by this issue for a little bit too long, but I did succeed in solving it, at last:

I've put some code about line caps and joins in Processing & OpenGL up on Processing Hacks in case it's something that bothers you too. I've not tested it extensively so I'd welcome bug fixes and suggestions there, or in the comments here. One thing I'm interested in doing next is extending (or reimplementing) BasicStroke to generate shapes for thick polylines with varying line thickness. If that's something you've done before, please let me know.

I'm using Java's BasicStroke to generate the path outlines, and GLU's tesselators to generate a mesh that will fill correctly in OpenGL. I "borrowed" the code for the latter from Ben Fry's PGraphicsOpenGL font rendering – thanks Ben!