Driver SVG_Control & subdivision surfaces

SVGControl

My brother created a great driver for Image_3D called "SVGControl". This one enables you to display the threedimensional scenes created by Image_3D in your browser as a SVG. Plus you get several buttons to modify the SVG directly in your browser. For now you can move and zoom the scene - but there will be some more transformations in the near future.

For me it works with native firefox >1.5 and each browser which uses the Adobe SVG plugin to display SVGs. Moving the objects around consumes some processor power, so that you should not try to render scenes with far more then 200 polygones with this driver. The browsers are not optimized for this task ;-).

Compliment to my brother for this really great driver. I imagine live changing real 3D graphs in my browser with the possibility to move around to focus some special details... :-).

Subdivision surfaces

Example for subdivision surfaces

Subdivision surfaces are a method to add more polygones to an existing object. A very good choice to do this is the "Catmull-Clark " algorithm. I implemented this one on object basis for Image_3D, so that you can increase the detail level of each object by calling:

Where $factor is the count of iterations. Each iteration will multiply the polygoncount of the object by the average number of edges each polygon has. You see an example with a simple 3ds model on the right side. The first pig is the original model, and the other two are with one and two iterations of the Catmull-Clark algorithm.

The result ist fantastic - I am really fascinated by the quality of the resulting models. It seems, that the algorithm adds valid information to the model, which of course is never possible.

Both features will be in the next release of Image_3D and can be found in CVS from now on.