You don't draw a shape with an array of points, unless you are using a voxel engine or a volumetric renderer. In 3D graphics you usually are drawing surfaces composed of triangles. There's R3MeshBuilder and R3MeshShape for drawing generic meshes. I believe there examples are a bit hidden. For each vertex in a triangle you have specify:

- Position

- Surface normal value at position

- Color

- Texture coordinates. Used if the material has a texture.

In 3D, the problem of fractals is what kind of fractal you want make. A rough classification is like this:

- 2D textures

- Solid textures

- Displacement maps. This is used for terrain heights.

- Hyper-textures

For images of them, this talk of Ken Perlin http://www.noisemachine.com/talk1/�� is really good.

The first three ones are easy to make, but to do them efficiently and animated in real-time you need offload the computation to the GPU by using shaders or OpenCL.

A hyper texture defines a density function for each point in the space. This requires a volumetric renderer. which is really hard to make in OpenGL. But you get volumetric smoke, clouds and very cool things.

I actually have to make a demo with fractal/multifractal terrains, for a course about computational geometry I am taking, and I choose to use Pharo. But I want to use OpenCL for the computation because I can make things more flexible easily but in the expense of complicating the synchronization. I am starting this personal project to start making a 3D game engine in Pharo and also for as an opportunity to take all the low-level graphics out of Roassal 3D.

When I have something to show, I will be posting it.

Regards

Ronie

2014-04-30 19:43 GMT-04:00 Cl��ment Bera <bera.clement@gmail.com>:

2014-04-30 11:32 GMT-07:00 Ronie Salgado <roniesalg@gmail.com>:

Hi Cl��ment,

There is not a stable version available, in fact Roassal3D requires the bleeding edge version of NBOpenGL to work, which is producing your error. Try loading Roassal3D using the following Gofer script, which is available in the Roassal3D smalltalk hub http://smalltalkhub.com/#!/~ronsaldo/roassal3d :

Gofer new smalltalkhubUser: 'ronsaldo' project: 'roassal3d'; package: 'ConfigurationOfRoassal3d'; load. (Smalltalk at: #ConfigurationOfRoassal3d) loadDevelopment

For 3D fractals, I haven't added support for them. That sounds like an interesting idea.

What do you mean there is no support for fractals ? Can you draw a 3D shape based on an Array of Point3D ?��

Fractals are nice because they impress people on demos and they are fun to implement, however I don't know if they represent a common use case for business applications.

Regards

Clement

Greetings,

Ronie

2014-04-30 14:09 GMT-04:00 Sven Van Caekenberghe <sven@stfx.eu>:

The 2D stuff works for me, but there seems to be a problem with the 3D stuff.

I hope the Rossal developers can fix this soon, since we're showing off Rossal with the 3.0 release....

On 30 Apr 2014, at 18:53, Cl��ment Bera <bera.clement@gmail.com> wrote:

> Hello,
>
> I wanted to show some 3D visualization with Pharo to some people (because you know, non IT people are only impressed by robots and 3d, so I cannot show them a compiler).
>
> On the Pharo 3 release, in the configuration browser, I clicked on Roassal3d then 'Install stable version'.
>
> Then I was not able to run a single example of R3Example, I always got:
>

> <Screen Shot 2014-04-30 at 9.51.42 AM.png>

>
> How can I have an image with Roassal3D working ?
>
> I would like to try to draw a 3D fractal too (I love fractals).
>
> Thanks !