Blog

I have put online http://showwebgl.com it’s a website for artists and developers who want to show and share their models. The workflow is really simple you have a model you want to show to people. Upload it and get the url of the model, then share the url or embed the model in an iframe.
The current website is still in progress so consider it in beta, in a few weeks It will have a nice skin and better feature, but you can still try it and report to bug to me :)

The list of file format showwebgl is able to read the following file extension obj, ive, 3ds, dae, ply, osg2, osgb, osgt, osgx, osgs, gem, geo, mdl, rgb, lws, dxf, tgz, osgterrain, shp, zae, stl, sta, bvh, ac, flt, ogr, osga, md2, x, json, txp, dw, osgtgz, 3dc, asc, lw, lwo, gdal, bsp, osg

You can add texture putting everything inside a zip archive, for example you can put your collada model and its texture inside a zip then upload the zip file.

The back end use OpenSceneGraph :)

I have written this afternoon a little class to manage graph, for osg.js I will need to graph the update/cull/draw traversal and I guess more others things, so I needed a stats functionnality a bit like in Three.js demo. I have first get his stats.js, but it did not fit my use and I wanted to try without redrawing the full graph. I want to get the previous result of the canvas then shift it by a delta (new_time – previous_time) and draw only one line for the delta elapsed. I have not check if it produces better performance but it was cool to code it. You can see the result here and the source code is on bitbucket . The only problem I could see is that the line are not as clean as it could because they are not connect from a full path, and the consequence is that antialias can’t work on the full path.

Since I play with WebGL, I wanted a way to work as I do with OpenSceneGraph. So I started to write a subset of OpenSceneGraph in javascript that uses same concept. For this I have done a plugin for OpenSceneGraph that is able to export scene graph to osgjs json format. osgjs.org is young but still ready to be used for project, I have created osgjs.org to centralize information related to it. The project needs users and contributors, so want to help ? Go to osgjs.org and try it.

Packt Publishing have published a new OpenSceneGraph beginners book, I am happy for having reviewed the technical part of this book and I recommand it for all beginners who wanted to start quickly on OpenSceneGraph

I have played with render to texture to generate particles with physics, the idea is to compute particles position on the gpu and use it as input to render them. For this I have use the firefox logo in 512×512 so we have 262144 particles animated even if somes are invisibles. You can find some useful information from this articles http://directtovideo.wordpress.com/2009/10/06/a-thoroughly-modern-particle-system/
Ideally It would be great to have render to texture that support floating point for webGL, but without that I did a 16 bits precision with two textures ( high bits and low bits). It’s a bit boring, in fact It breaks me to try more effects, I would really like to have render to texture with floating point support.

To get a WebGL Implementation have look to Khronos instructions http://www.khronos.org/webgl/wiki/Getting_a_WebGL_Implementation

You need a browser able to run webGL to try the realtime version http://plopbyte.net/webgl-particles-demo else click on the image to show the youtube video.