vA3C Viewer R3 Update: Now with Save and Open

Three.js Examples - FGx Aircraft - vA3C Grasshopper

The glorious thing about a computer is that it enables you to process data, save that data, and then - later and elsewhere - open that data for re-processing. This saving and opening thing - being such a sacred holy grail of computing - is normally programmed by the very high-priests in the various cults of data-crunchers. Moving that array of pixels on your screen down to very tiny magnetic blips onto the platter that's spinning very fast and from there to a server-farm in, say, Brea, California and from there to an array of pixels on your friend's screen in Poznan, Poland is not self-evident. It's a job best left to people with PhDs, distinguished resumes and first class brain cells.

The vA3C Viewer app that's being worked on is for viewing data files. So saving is not really a thing that viewers need to do. Unfortunately, the ability to move things about and change materials started creeping into the viewer. So now there are different states: Do you want to see that pretty pony in blue? Or in pink?

AlgeSurf PE - Jurgen Meier Equations

Thus a way of registering those states for reuse would be nice. The previous release of the viewer has the ability to create permalinks - text added onto the end of a URL. In turn these were hand--massaged into text files that restores selected states.

The plan was and still is to automate that process for R3. The idea is to provide a 'save' button that would collect all the links to all the models in the display along with their position, rotation and scale and save these into a script file that you can load that recreates what you had on your display when you saved.

vA3C Revit - Three.js Examples

This is a simple and light weight method and very doable. It is not the same thing as going through every item of geometry, finding every face, vertex and the associated materials and shuffling these all into a tidy bundle on your hard disk. This latter activity is for the pros. The former is OK for script kiddies such as your vA3C Viewer team.

Well, upon the morning that had been appropriated to the permalink coding task, it was decided that reviewing Mr.doob's Three.js Editor would be a good thing.

The Editor does *not* have a save feature. It does, however, have a command that reads the data in memory and sends that data as text to a new window where you can review the data.

vA3C Grasshopper - Three.js Examples

And, then, it turns out the HTML5 has the new ability to enable you to save text that's in a window to a file on your hard disk.

Somehow these two thoughts became co-mingled. Code was copied, pasted and cobbled together. A 'Save' button was added to the vA3C Viewer.

FGx Aircraft - Three.js Examples - AlgeSurf PE Jurgen Meier Equations  

And then, the Save button was clicked.

The mental lollipops nearly fell on the floor.

It worked.

vA3C Viewer R3 is now enabled to take all the data that is in the display and write it out to a brand new JSON file. And these files, in turn can be used to create further JSON files.

Of course, it's not perfect. Files with shaders and other exotics don't work. Somethings come in and can be edited and others can't.  But many fun things do work.

The images on this page show assemblies of files from the FGx Aircraft libray, the Jaanga AlgeSurf parametric equations library, the Three.js Examples library and the vA3C JSON files prepared for the AEC Hackathon. It's an assembly of arbitrary colorful fantasies.

So, yes, the computer has the wonderful ability to process data and to save it and reuse it. Unfortunately this does not stop the peeps with loose wing nuts from producing hyper-whimsical images.

Links
vA3C HTML5 R3
Viewer Live Demo
Read Me
Source Code

AlgeSurf Parametric Equations: Math in 3D - fast, pretty and easy

The Breather Surface. Use your pointing device to pan rotate and zoom

Some of of best friends are mathematicians. This does not mean I necessarily like what they do. On the contrary, I find the Euler-derived notation difficult to parse, not easy to remember and not really pretty to look at. And then, say you have equations printed on a piece of paper or even displayed in Wikipedia - such as the Frobenius Endomorphism. Now tap or swipe the equation with your fingers. Nothing happens! People spend hours formatting text that just so it ends up sitting still like this. How lame is that?

Thank goodness there are alternatives. One of may favorites is computerese. Just translate the equation into Java or Python or JavaScript and now the number of people that can read what is going on increases from thousands to millions.

And another really nice way of displaying math is via the computer display. The display above is generated by the latest update to AlgeSurf - called AlgeSurf PE. PE stands for parametric equations.

The code for the above can be see in breather-surface.html. A much refined and enhanced version is available via the new Equation Browser.

This new display technique represents a major shift in direction from the previously released AlgeSurf Marching Cubes Builder and Player, Both the the Marching Cubes and the Parametric equations apps serve the same purpose: to provide access a extensive libraries of well-known equations and allow you to display, edit and enhance these in 3D.

The Marching Cubes app enables you to do this by accepting and parsing text you enter into an input box - and the text being as close as possible to the standard mathematicians way of writing things. A lot of time and coding went into this effort - with the emphasis being on hiding the code from your view as much as possible.

In other word, the Marching Cube app aids and abets you trying to behave like an old-timey mathematician.

The Parametric Equations app, however, is all about *coding* math. There are 170+ equations - all derived from Jurgen Meier's wonderful web site full of math tutorials written in Java. Each equation is presented as a stand alone HTML file. The files are about 75 lines short and contain everything need to load and view the equation in real-time 3D.

You are very much encouraged to open up any of the files, change the equation and see what happens. It's a fast, fun and easy way to get going with exploring.

The thing is that math can hard and complex and very time-consuming as well. For this you have the Equation Browser. This app reads the the HTML files and adds many features to the display of the equations. Features include the following:

• Reads, parses and displays remote Three.js HTML files
• Support real-time 3D pan, rotate and zoom
• Adds access and editing to full complement of materials, reflections, lights, shade and shadows
• Update geometry parameters in real-time
• Display wireframe, face & vertex normals
• Select background colors or gradients

And the list of future wish list enhancements is even longer.

And as important as the new features might be for helping progress math and math apps, there is perhaps an even more important aspect. JavaScript and Three.js are not APIs or apps but they are languages - coming out of infancy and into broad application.  Both the Marching Cubes and Parametric Equations routines are demonstrations that these tools can have highly diverse and profound mathematical application. And when you click them, stuff happens.

Links:

AlgeSurf PE Equation Browser
AlgeSurf PE Read Me
AlgeSurf PE Source Code