Canvas 3d JS Library

We were going to release this before Christmas but around mid November, Patrick Lam joined the team and started working on our project also. His role was to add picking to our project. Picking (ie point at scene with mouse and have it return the object it is pointing at) is one of those very necessary components. Without it, the library always felt very incomplete to me. For example: http://lbi.lostboys.nl/blog/artikelen/canvas-in-full-3d/ has a great little demo that was done with a 2D canvas. When I saw that I thought … how hard would it be to make something like this using our library? Generating the panes would have been pretty easy. Moving the camera (or the panes) around to view the panes from different angles would not have been hard at all.  Adding the picture to a given pane would have been pretty easy also but if we built one using one of our previous versions of the library, it would have not been nearly as good.  Main reason is that we didn’t have picking.  The user would have had to work out how to pick one of these panes mathematically or resort to using something like key strokes and labels to apply the picture.  Thus, I was very pleased when Patrick said he wanted to give it a go and add picking to our library.

When Patrick first joined the team, I admit that I was a little worried that he would have a harder time getting that component working as he did not have that much 3D programming experience. However, he did a fantastic job and finished Bounding Box picking just before Christmas. Andor then encorporated what Patrick was doing with the work he had done with Collada files. Patrick is nearly done with per triangle picking and Andor will be encoporating that into our library very soon.

So whats next??

Well there are several things that are continuing:

1. refactoring … kind of boring… no eye candy here. However, we are working on standardizing our naming conventions, inheritance structures and so on.
2. per triangle picking – this is almost ready. Soon we will be able to do picking at a much finer level of detail
3. particle systems… Andor has been working really hard on this. If you haven’t had a chance yet to see his work, you really should look.
4. bug fixes … yes, there are still bugs. One of the biggest is our GC pausing error… Hopefully we can reduce/eliminate the GC pause bug
5. collision detection. With picking almost complete, Patrick is now going to turn his attention to adding collision dectection to the library.
6. Tutorial updates. Almost all the current tutorials are out of date. There will be some big changes in near future to update them to meet the current spec of the library.
7. More Demos!

Lots of other things are going on.  If you have interest in developing something for or with the library please don’t hesitate to contact us!