peter nitsch.net

Check it out! (note: requires FP 10.0.22)

I thought I'd give an early demo of a 3D metaball system that I've been working on in the lab for the last week. As fate has it, Frank Reitberger also posted a fantastic metaball experiment today with great results. Where our systems differ, is that I've written mine entirely in C++ through Alchemy with the intention of eventually tying it directly to my particle emitter, ensuring the least amount of data marshaling possible.

Keep in mind, this is an early preview and some glitches still exists, namely some forward facing triangles are being rendered in the incorrect order. I plan on sorting the indices in C++ once I find a suitable technique.

Of course, what would a blob simulator be without the necessary webcam support?

For the Alchemy coders, I thought I'd mention an important lesson that was learned with this experiment. Originally I had the vertices, normals, and uvts stored in a value object that looked like this:

The problem is that that blocks of the Alchemy RAM ByteArray are overwritten unless explicitly allocated, and therefore the start of the vertices data was getting written over by indices. The solution is simple and obvious, allocate memory:

UPDATE: Added reflection and Frank's Pixel Bender Fisheye filter to the webcam view.