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Morris - Texas A&M University

1. 36 4 Rectangular Wireframe Modeling 38 5 New Approach to Interactive Rind Modeling 39 6 New Approach to Extrusions 39 7 New Approach to Other Basic Operators 40 S Scripting Interface ud sde hae XR das ee s 41 E Portability and Platform Independence 42 F nternationalization s 4 4 4 ege nae p A A ee RES 43 G Online Community ad ross a e we E ade 44 LOs wm n Bk Se Gh E SIS e ak Le am d AT 2 gt DISCUSSION Forin uu sne de Biche IR Bie Be Bee we 49 e IA Se eG Ld 50 4 User MANUEL ina S oa E oem E Roue 92 5 Source Code Documentation 54 6 Subversion Repository cn 56 T Web Site Usage Statistics a a 58 IV RESORT A A e ae a E e a 60 V CONCLUSION AND FUTURE WORK 2 68 REFERENCE S a sor le Be wee eS A a Eb ee A X P TOR S 71 MUDA poa a SS ete ek E Seah hk kG a oa A 76 FIGURE 10 11 12 13 14 LIST OF FIGURES Screenshot of the previous version of TopMod which uses the FLTK user interface library a a Screenshot of the interface from Maya 7 on OS X Screenshot of Blender s interface Screenshot of Rhinoceros3D s interface 2 ss Screenshot of the Wings3D interface ll les Screenshot of the user interfaces of Silo SLIDE Google SketchUp Cheetah 3D k3dSurf and Sculpture Generator Screenshots fr
2. i Ep E E 0 059059 0 055 05 f About TopMod A amp Open f Open an existing file Y Save Y Save the document to disk f Save As f Save the document under a n ef Load amp Texture Y Load Texture from file Y Print 8Information 2 Print Information to the console 2 Print amp Face List 2 Print Face List to the console Q Print amp Edge List Abo Om 2 Print Edge list to the console Acerca TopMod Guess Ctrl 1 2 Ewit Exit the application 2 amp Undo Show amp Vertices 2 Show 8Sihouette 2 Show amp Wireframe 2 Show amp Grid 3 Show amp Coordinate Axes amp Normal Renderer gi 04 inhtad Nandarar A phrase book suggestion for about was ignored Fig 29 Screenshot from the Qt Linguist application 29 Once a translation file is complete it can be resubmitted to the code repository and compiled into TopMod releases TopMod can be translated by choosing a lan guage from the Help Language menu At this time TopMod has been translated into French by a member of the discussion forum Frency Pilou and is currently be ing translated into German Spanish Italian and Turkish by other members of the TopMod community See Fig 30 G Online Community An old version of TopMod has been available since 2005 through Dr Ergun Akleman s web page at http www viz tamu edu faculty ergun research topology Through various google search terms such as top
3. ms 4 0 1 A O e VA Uu d ve A Fa Fig 23 Two of the advanced extrusion operators from Eric Landreneau s thesis research dodecahedral and octahedral used in conjunction with various remeshing modes Ta co OOF 4 VOL OEY Fig 24 Screenshots of bezier patch models in the TopMod viewport 38 PS Y A S a VET AY SN N LON AAA L d V XX SS NS j era tt Fig 25 A series of wireframe models with different cross sectional dimensions 4 Rectangular Wireframe Modeling The thesis work of Esan Mandal involved implementing a wireframe modeling feature in TopMod that converts all of the edges in a model to square cross sectional tubes that connect to form a solid mesh After looking through the source code at the functions that make this feature possible I realized that the square cross section was being determined by two separate values that the user interface only allowed to be set to the same value By exposing two floating point spin boxes to the user interface users can now create wireframe models with rectangular cross sections See Fig 25 This new mode can be especially helpful in designing architectural structures with TopMod 99 5 New Approach to Interactive Rind Modeling Another specialized feature in TopMod that allows users to create high genus models interactively is the rind modeling tool In order to create a rind or crust in To
4. by CommandCompleter QLabel CommandCompleter mQuickCommandLabel private je in the popup window lommandCompleter hh nced by CemmandCompleter QstringListModel CommandCompleter mModel private the completion model for the AutoCompleler widget Dfrition at ine 44 of fle CommandCompleter hh ed by Commandcompleter The docu or this class was generated rom tne Tollowing Ties CommandCompleter hh CommandCompleter ce Fig 37 Screenshot from the TopMod source code documentation web page be quite time consuming The final location of the generated source code documen tation is http topmod3d org doc See Fig 37 The comments in the source code are not complete but the method for generating the documentation helps speed up the entire process of documenting the TopMod source code which presently contains around 160 000 source lines of code subversion Repository In the past TopMod has been developed at the Visualization Laboratory by a variety of students and professors at different times There has never existed one central repository for the TopMod source code and as a result there are at least six different versions which each contain unique features that the others do not TopMod was in desperate need of a source code repository to promote true collaboration and to unify ot What s new Help Sign in Goo le on Search Projects Search the Web Topol
5. A 33 12 17 44 am Use Firefox General I i admin View Edit Delete blip tv 32 2007 08 11 TopMod Videos Old vs New Genera I 0 admin View Edit Delete 3 02 51 pm 17 O 3d Life Player General I 0 admin View Edit Delete 2 11 21 am 16 m TopMod Video Tutorials on blip tv Genera I 0 admin View Edit Delete 15 AMD TopMod YouTube General 2 admin View Edit Delete 2 40 03 am 14 cdi TopMod Wiki and LiveGraphics3D General 0 admin View Edit Delete ess 44 05 pm 13 goes Updates to the TopMod Wiki Genera 0 admin View Edit Delete 1 15 09 am 1 ida dad Welcome to TopMod General 2 admin View Edit Delete 2 25 08 pm something goes wrong with a plugin and you E and it will be automatically deactivated pane to the Tapas M Get More Plugins ou can find additional plugins for ory Ipc Welcome to TopMod WORDPRESS Documentation Support Forums 2 2 1 0 83 seconds WORDPRESS Documentation support Forums 2 2 1 2 99 seconds Fig 33 Screenshots from the topmod3d org blog administration interface the plugin panel and the main page The main page style was adapted from the Big Blue theme created by Bob Jiwakacau and also allows for the creation of static pages to store constant information such as an About page WordPress is highly extensible as well with a variety of plugins for displaying videos inside blog posts displaying custom RSS feeds in sidebar templates See Fig 33 and generating sitemap files to speed up se
6. Englewood Cliffs NJ Prentice Hall 1993 M Kraus Livegraphics3d homepage http www vis uni stuttgart de kraus LiveGraphics3D Online accessed 19 June 2007 The Blender Foundation Blender wiki http wiki blender org Online accessed 20 July 2007 E Akleman and J Chen Guaranteeing 2 manifold property for meshes by using doubly linked face list International Journal of Shape Modeling vol 5 no 2 pp 149 177 December 1999 E Akleman J Chen and V Srinivasan A minimal and complete set of opera tors for the development of robust manifold mesh modelers Graphical Models vol 65 no 5 pp 286 304 February 2003 E Akleman J Chen V Srinivasan and F Eryoldas A new corner cutting scheme with tension and handle face reconstruction International Journal of Shape Modeling vol 7 no 2 pp 111 121 December 2001 E Akleman and J Chen Regular meshes ACM Symposium on Solid Mod eling and Applications SM pp 213 219 2005 10 11 2 E Akleman and J Chen Regular mesh construction algorithms using regular handles Proceedings IEEE International Conference on Shape Modeling and Applications 2006 SMI 2006 vol 2006 2006 E Akleman and J Chen Insight for practical subdivision modeling with dis crete gauss bonnet theorem Lecture Notes in Computer Science including subseries Lecture Notes in Artificial Intelligence and Lecture Notes
7. 29 T Roosendaal and S Selleri Blender 2 3 Guide Free 3D Creation Suite for Modeling Animation and Rendering San Francisco CA No Starch Press 2005 130 R Cheng Inside Rhinoceros 4 Clifton Park NY OnWord Press 2007 31 LL Larry Gould 3d modeling and rendering for the rest of us http www autofieldguide com articles 090409 html Online accessed 30 August 2007 32 LL J Blanchette and M Summerfield C GUI Programming with Qt 4 Upper Saddle River NJ Prentice Hall PTR 2006 33 N Bornstein and E Dumbill Mono A Developer s Handbook Sebastopol CA O Reilly 2004 34 J Smart K Hock and S Csomor Cross Platform GUI Programming with wxWidgets Upper Saddle River NJ Prentice Hall 2005 35 B Hook Write Portable Code An Introduction to Developing Software for Multiple Platforms San Francisco CA No Starch Press 2005 36 LIL Trolltech About trolltech http trolltech com company about Online ac cessed 8 June 2007 37 Trolltech Qt reference documentation open source edition http doc trolltech com 4 3 Online accessed 8 June 2007 19 38 The Blender Foundation The blender documentation project http www blender org download documentation Online accessed 20 July 2007 139 Google Urchin 5 web analytics software http www google com analytics urchin software html Online accessed 27 J
8. dumorrisgpomai com My Account Help Contactus Sign Out Google Analytics Analytics Settings ES Dashboard Duan State Detail paro Export v Enai BE Add to Dashboard New vs Returning Q Zoom out Languages VistorTrerding Jul 15 2007 Aug 14 2007 Vistor Loyaty Browser Capatities m ork Properties User Cof Trafic Sources O Content P Goals Settings E Emai Help Resources 2 Aboutthis Report O conversor Universty O Common Guestons O revon rincer This state sent 66 visits via 13 cities et Cty Semet Choose Y Gan Canetsion views E Visits Pages Visit Avs Time on Site O 6 New Visits G Bounce Rate 3 66 6 92 00 18 40 50 00 53 03 of Ste Total 5 03 Site Avg 6 86 0 96 Site Avg 00 08 27 121 10 Ste Avg 61 66 18 91 Site Avg 32 77 61 80 city mis Paces Vist Ava TmeonSite NewVsis Bounce Rate 1 College Station E E 00 25 08 25 64 51 28 2 Houston 5 00 00 13 58 100 00 40 00 3 Dalas 4 325 0 12 11 75 00 25 00 4 dustin 4 325 001237 100 00 25 00 s Bnan E 333 00 01 30 ener cer 6 Waco 3 190 00 00 00 68 67 100 00 7 Henderson 8 190 00 00 00 50 00 100 00 8 san Antonio 4 m 00 12 16 100 00 0 00 9 Nursery 1 190 00 20 00 100 00 100 00 10 New Braunfels 1 190 00 00 00 100 00 100 00 11 Kende 1 100 00 00 00 100 00 4100 00 12 Chanseniew 1 35 00 00 11 17 100 00 0 00 43 Richardson 1 190 00
9. Main Colors Shortcuts Stylesheets Style WindowsXP Tv Style Sheet QWidget color white background color rgb 56 54 55 QPushButton background color rgb 82 94 104 border radius 10px border style outset border width 2px border color rgb 31 31 31 padding 6px min width 4em QPushButton pressed background color rgb 241 146 3 border style inset QPushButton disabled 1 color rgb 127 135 144 QComboBox color white background rgb 127 135 144 QDoubleSpinBox 1 backaround black apply Cancel Fig 11 Screenshot of the stylesheet customization dialog in the TopMod preferences win dow window that allows users to type CSS like commands to change various properties borders margins padding colors of different widgets such as toolbars menus push buttons and spin boxes See Fig 11 This allows users to give their version unique characteristics or settings with which they are more comfortable I have also implemented an interactive shortcut customization feature which allows users to set custom shortcuts for any command available in TopMod The shortcut preferences dialog will accept keyboard input to set each shortcut e g hit the CTRL key and then the X key as opposed to having the user type in a custom string such as CTRL X The dialog will capture your keystrokes and attempt to set the custom shortcut for that command See Fig 12 These settings as
10. Scripting Interface Stuart Tett s thesis research involved writing a scripting engine to expose TopMod s core and auxiliary operations to allow users to quickly and easily perform repetitive tasks as well as extend the functionality of TopMod without editing the source code In order to allow users to write scripts interactively within the TopMod interface a custom script editor interface needed to be implemented in the new version of TopMod I helped Stuart through the process of created the scripting interface using Qt s interface widgets and made sure the code was consolidated into the final version See Fig 28 I also manage the various releases of TopMod that contain the scripting interface as they need to be separated from the normal TopMod application that does not require Python to be installed 42 E 505sueeee 90460900 99099 0709004460006 ALGUAZAS e Fig 28 Screenshot from TopMod with the Python scripting interface by Stuart Tett E Portability and Platform Independence It is often desirable to run an application on an operating system or user account which does not necessarily have permission or sufficient privileges to install software that changes contents of system wide files or directories This is often the case with large companies as well as university computer labs In order to allow TopMod to run in these situations as well as to make updating the program easier it has been designed to run portably
11. a neighboring edge that is also not selected This shrinking or contracting operation will remove all boundary edges from the selection set See Fig 21 D Thesis Research Consolidation Over the last six years a number of students in the Visualization Sciences program have contributed to TopMod through personal interest and thesis research projects A student working on the TopMod source code would typically download the code to their own directory learn how it worked add their own code to extend functionality of existing features or to create entirely new features and test the results on the lab computers It was not often that the code written into their own versions was integrated back into the main version on the server For that matter there was never really a main centralized version of TopMod to which code could be added As a result there were many different versions of TopMod floating around the lab and no one had the opportunity to experience all the new features in one single version I decided to locate some of the projects that were never introduced into the public version of the software and add them into a final centralized code repository In searching through the various versions of the TopMod source code I also exposed 30 some interesting hidden features from the source code to the new user interface 1 Planar Modeling The thesis research of Ozgur Gonen involved implementing a series of pla
12. click menu will show a list of commands towards the top of the menu which have to do with selecting faces See Fig 14 The bottom portion of the right click menu will then be filled with commands 2 CC that are common across the entire application such as tools remeshing modes and selection masks 4 Heads Up Display The heads up display in the TopMod viewport window displays various information about the current state of the model and the application itself The HUD currently displays the operating mode in which the user is working the current remeshing mode Select All HA Select Inverse l Select Multiple eM Select Similar 05 Selection Window QW Grow Selection Shrink Selection Clear Selected Esc Select Face Loop lt P Select Faces By Surf Area HA Checkerboard Select Faces OK Select Edges from Faces Select Vertices from Faces Tools Remeshing Selection Masks Be Basics Extrusion Conical High Genus Texturing Quick Command Perform Extrusion SEX Subdivide Selected Faces HB Subdivide Selected Edges HE Object p TR Y oo Y Y Fig 14 Screenshot of the face selection mode right click menu 29 26 Mode Select Checkerboard Vertices 352 Sel Vertices 0 Remeshing Mode Doo Sabin Edges 1056 Sel Edges 0 Extrusion Mode Cubical Faces 528 Sel Faces 528 Selection Mode Faces Genus 898 Sel Corners 0 Fig 15 Screenshot of the TopMod heads up display rendere
13. have not been fully tested it is prone to crashing while a user is in the middle of making a complex model While it is out of the scope of this thesis to investigate and fix all the internal 20 errors related to the DLFL data structure that cause TopMod to crash I have taken these issues into consideration when implementing an auto save and an incremental save feature Auto save allows the user to choose an interval of time in minutes after which to automatically save their model to disk overwriting the previously saved version of the file T his allows users to pick up where they left off if TopMod happens to crash during a complex operation without having the explicitly choose File Save before each operation is executed Incremental save when toggled will append a 3 digit string of numbers to the end of the current file and save it under that new name with the same extension Each time a save operation is executed whether manually or automatically through the auto save feature TopMod will increment the 3 digit number up to the limit set by the user in the prefences window T he default limit is 20 so TopMod will save up to 20 versions of the model If save is executed more than 20 times TopMod will wrap the suffix number back around from 020 to 000 and begin to overwrite the existing files in that order This is a feature common to many 3D modeling applications as it is very difficult to manage revisions within a single
14. integrated it into the new repository and added the necessary interface widgets These extrusion modes are extremely versatile and can produce very interesting results when used in 36 Fig 22 Screenshots demonstrating the process of cutting multiple vertices and edges conjunction with various remeshing modes See Fig 23 3 Bezier Patch Rendering Dr Akleman and Dr Srinivasan implemented a Bezier patch rendering functionality in one branch of TopMod that allowed users to view models as bezier patch surfaces and Stuart Tett implemented an export feature that allows the bezier patch model to be exported as an OBJ file which can be imported into any 3D software that supports Bezier Patch OBJ files such as Maya These features were first implemented in different versions of the source code and I made sure the necessary code from each version was integrated into the final code repository and functioned properly with the new Qt based interface See Fig 24 37 RN Ses 3 DAT XE VON IA LJ a AS LARA it o Lens Na iy Gd 4 2 S AA e SN WA KA Md Ve 4 p a Ag US MIT SS WA LB 0 SR we EA SAY IUS EOS Lh A aw ap A x i 3 raid I Ee lt DY NN 2 we We Z V L1 p S e AG 97 IAS ES ap D BEA dl a j D lt i LX
15. is to use a system of graphical icons to represent various commands and operations in an application and provide a string of text or tooltip to further describe the operation as the user hovers the mouse over that particular icon However in many complex computer graphics applications with literally hun dreds and often thousands of unique commands such as Autodesk Maya defining a clear and consistent system of graphical icons can be an overwhelming task and can often result in more confusion for the users This problem can be lessened slightly by grouping similar icons into convenient toolbars that can be placed on or near other windows to provide faster access with the mouse This thesis follows the style of IEEE Transactions on Automatic Control Any remotely complex computer graphics package necessitates a clear hierarchy of menus and submenus as well As features are added to a particular application and the menus become buried deeper into sub levels of the main menus as is the case with Maya and Blender it is necessary to provide users with context aware popup menus typically accessible by right clicking the mouse These popup menus allow users to access commonly user operations with a single click of the mouse without having to move it to the menu bar usually located at the top of the screen or application window With a clear and easy to understand hierarchy of top level and sub level menu items as well as an intuitive right
16. known as Launchy http launchy sourceforge net but is used primarily to launch applications and lacks extra features such as email and instant messaging See Fig 7 e MAYA a T MAYA Maya IF Applications Alias maya7 0 Maya a Maya E Ape me apo s 89 Applications Alias maya7 0 Maya app O Action 2 ctio aya gt Documents maya r DotMacSyncManager framework gt r Open 3 System Library Private Frameworks DotMa An e Optimizing Display Modes and Window Developer ADC Reference Library docum maya bi maya y y e NSMetadataQueryAttributeValueTuple ET y H 1 of 23 Fig 7 Screenshots from Quicksilver pop up CLI for OS X and Launchy a similar interface for Windows E GUI Toolkits Over the last fifteen to twenty years many individuals and corporations have taken on the daunting task of creating a universal graphical user interface toolkit to allow software developers to create and maintain complex graphical applications with rela tive ease Today many open source and commercial GUI toolkits are available for use in a variety of programming languages such as FLTK WxWidgets GTK originally developed for the GNU Image Manipulation Program and Qt 32 33 34 1 FLTK FLTK Fast Lightweight Toolkit is a free cross platform GUI library first developed in 1998 by Bill Spitzak and others under the LGPL license for the C programming language It has a significantly lower lea
17. many other popular 3D modeling applications such as Blender Maya and Google SketchUp it would be beneficial to the 3D modeling community at large to offer internationalization il8n support within TopMod The Qt open source widget toolkit provides a set of classes that allow for real time translation of applications independent of the development platform The TopMod source code is set up in such a way as to allow for real time translation into Spanish Italian German French Turkish and Catalan Translation data for each language is stored in an xml file that can be edited by volunteer users who speak any of these languages Qt provides a platform independent translation application that loads the xml file into an easy to use GUI that allowing editors to translate each string of text from the TopMod interface The translator application also provides predefined language dictionaries that will suggest translations and translate certain keywords automatically See Fig 44 Qt Linguist by Trolltech C topmod topmodx lang topmod es ts File Edit Translation Validation Phrases Tools View Help Balas oem larisa Context Bx No Options for this tool 2 Cleanup 2 Subdivisions 2 x translate Acerca TopMod qd Y translate Y Z translate d X scale Y scale d Z scale 2 amp Freeze Transforms CommandCompleter ConicalMode DLFL ScriptEditor ExtrusionsMode HighgenusMode MainWindow v Basics ef Extrusions
18. n 000229 moose non 20 catingce 1 m 00 1020 ese m 20 densas 1 200 000008 Dr 00 meo ae Cr ara Recon 2007 Google ananues Home pracy Poncy contactus Fig 39 Screenshots from the Google Analytics page for topmod3d org showing geo usage data for Texas France and Germany over a two week period graphic 60 CHAPTER IV RESULTS As a proof of concept all final images and animations have been created by a va riety of users in different 3D rendering packages such as Blender Maya 3D Studio Max and Maxwell Render as shown in Figures 42 45 The usability of the sys tem was tested in a graduate level computer graphics course as well as by visitors to http topmod3d org Students with diverse backgrounds including art architecture and computer science took the course and other users who found TopMod through the TopMod web site come from a variety of industries and backgrounds including plastics engineering architectural research 3D modeling computer science and dig ital art All the students and general users regardless of their background were able to successfully create very high genus models using a variety of input meshes Following are some significant results that have been achieved by using the new user interface presented in this thesis work e Very high genus models are created in significantly less time with the new interface See Fig 41 than was previously possible with the original interface
19. of the viewport the user can begin typing a command and a list will fill in a box below the text field with values that match what is currently being typed The arrow keys or mouse can be used to choose a command from the auto completion list and the command can be executed by hitting the return key By hiding the CLI in the background it does not take up valuable screen real estate while it is not being used but it still provides extremely fast access through the use of the spacebar shortcut The popup command line interface will also allow users to work in the full screen mode which will temporarily eliminate almost all of 24 Type a command Type a command Doo Sabin Remeshing Mode Doo Sabin Extrude Mode Doo Sabin Remeshing Mode Doo Sabin BC Remeshing Mode Doo Sabin BC New Remeshing Mode Fig 13 Screenshot of the TopMod pop up command line interface the graphical input elements from the display and allow the majority of the screen to be occupied by the mesh data See Fig 13 3 Context Sensitive Right Click Menus Users are also be able to access the majority of the commands from a series of context sensitive right click menus The menus will offer different lists of commands based on the users current mode of operation and their current selection in the viewport For example if a user is in a mode tool which requires a face or multiple faces to be selected such as cubical extrusion mode the right
20. way to figure out if anyone was actually using it and possibly find out where they were coming from and what pages they were looking at most often on the site To accomplish this task I turned to yet another free and easy to use software package known as Google Analytics formerly Urchin Software 39 Google Analytics allows web developers to track usage statistics for web sites simply by adding a few lines of javascript code to the end of each page within the site By using the various popular open source software packages described above I was able to embed the necessary lines of javascript code into each page of the http topmod3d org website in about ten minutes It required me to paste the lines of code into one template file for each application the wiki the forum the blog and the image gallery Google Analytics also allows their service to be embedded into a Google Code project where the TopMod subversion repository is currently hosted Once the proper Javascript code is embedded into each page of the site Google Analytics begins to collect usage data as visitors come to and leave the site It collects a wide variety of data such as referring pages geographic data See Fig 39 web browser and operating system data as well as the duration of each visit and the page last viewed before exiting the site At the time of this writing the web site was only two months old and had received 90 000 pageviews and 15 000 unique visits
21. 00 00 100 0096 100 00 Find ciy Fries E Go Goto r Show rows 700 1 130113 GID 52007 Google Anarcs Home prvacy Poncy Contactus Country Territory Detail France Q zoom Out This country territory sent 575 visits via 136 cities DetallLevet Cty Sagment Choose Y Oct 1 2007 Oct 1 2007 Vite Google Analytics dumorris gmailcom liy Account Help ContactUs Sign Out ES Dashboard Overview Country Territory Detail Germany Overview Map Overisy New vs Returning Languages Visitor Trending Vistor Loyaty Browser Capabities Network Properties User Defined Traffic Sources D Content P Goals Export Email B8 Add to Dashboard Q Zoom out Site Usage Jul 15 2007 Aug 14 2007 Visits y Visits O PagesiVisit O Avg Time on Site New Visits Bounce Rate 124 9 21 00 08 18 45 97 13 71 of Sie Tota 94S Sie Ave IS A29 Stem OUOBZT AGIW She Aa GOR 25454 Sie AVO 3277 SIT cy WEE eva armes amenas coment gem E m pe D 690 AEA 8 028 000515 sum zm m 1 E p umm umm n 1 en 0010316 Tam p s a 238 pom soo 250 s 7 122 w357 D 00 co s zm 00 1325 m 2000 b essen 4 m oooter soo 000 2 Aum 4 2m 000548 00 0 P ox astu 4 sso 000297 secs 00 pum 2 ec pe m 000 12 Dusseda 2 m 000112 moe 00 nmm 100 p oo mem 14 semen 1 200 000125 Dr Ir D 1 m 000028 Dr 00 D 1 100 00000 Dr Wr stuart 1 cm soar moe m ua 1 m pom Dr 00 7 Hide 1
22. A NEW GRAPHICAL USER INTERFACE FOR A 3D TOPOLOGICAL MESH MODELER A Thesis by DAVID VICTOR MORRIS Submitted to the Office of Graduate Studies of Texas A amp M University in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of MASTER OF SCIENCE May 2008 Major Subject Visualization Sciences A NEW GRAPHICAL USER INTERFACE FOR A 3D TOPOLOGICAL MESH MODELER A Thesis by DAVID VICTOR MORRIS Submitted to the Office of Graduate Studies of Texas A amp M University in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of MASTER OF SCIENCE Approved by Chair of Committee Ergun Akleman Committee Members Vinod Srinivasan Jianer Chen Head of Department Mark Clayton May 2008 Major Subject Visualization Sciences 111 ABSTRACT A New Graphical User Interface for a 3D Topological Mesh Modeler May 2008 David Victor Morris B E D Texas A amp M University Chair of Advisory Committee Dr Ergun Akleman In this thesis I present a new platform independent open source intuitive graphical user interface for TopMod an application designed for interacting with 3 dimensional manifold meshes represented by a Doubly Linked Face List DLFL lhis new interface created using the Trolltech Qt user interface library enables users to construct and interact with complex manifold meshes much faster and more easily than was previously possible I also present a method for the rapid creation of a successf
23. Another interesting change to the TopMod interface is the technique or process for creating crust or rind models Figure 45 was created by selecting three face loops containing more than 1000 faces and using the new crust modeling tool which punches the selected faces out of the model simultaneously With the old version of the crust modeling tool this operation would have taken over 1000 individual clicks to remove the same faces With regard to the new TopMod web site I have received a significant amount of feedback from the user community through the discussion forum and the blog and have discovered people who have been using TopMod in a variety of environments from academic to professional For example Matias del Campo a professor at the Southern California Institute of Architecture SCI Arc and the University of Applied Arts die Angewandte in Vienna Austria uses TopMod with his students in his Emergent Density course which covers various aspects of urban design and digital fabrication Santiago Perez a professor at the University of Houston also uses TopMod with his students in a digital fabrication and materials investigation course 1 have included a series of images below with permission from the members of the TopMod discussion forum who created them along with some of my own models See Figs 42 46 47 48 64 m 2007 c jote T yo a mS Fig 42 A model created using the new version of To
24. See Fig 40 e The enhanced sub object selection routines allow for massive selection sets to be obtained in less time than previous methods e Application portability platform independence and internationalization allow TopMod to be used by a larger number of people worldwide e Keyboard shortcut customization and general interface customization and pref erences options allow TopMod to be tailored to the needs and desires of the individual user and saved for future use 61 Ml DLFL Demo O xi File Edit Display Renderer Object Selection Grou High Genus Modeling y High Genus Modeli Ada Handle shape interpolatior y Number of Segments A of IEA to Connect 1 E Weight 1 Bo MALL Ln M Symmetric Weights Weight 2 Extra Twists p NHLLLLLLEI Fig 40 Screenshot of the old FLTK TopMod interface e The new web community provides TopMod users and developers access to the latest versions of the application and source code and allows them to learn how to use the software and discuss problems and future developments It is expected upon completion that users will be able to interact with Top Mod much more easily and intuitively to create complex manifold meshes in shorter amounts of time All of the operations will be more easily accessible and it will be much more obvious what each operation does through the in context documentation In particular the Rind M
25. UI features of OS X as is possible with Qt 33 16 4 Qt Development of the Qt user interface library began in 1991 by Haavard Nord and Eirik Chambe Eng who would later incorporate their developments into what be came known as Quasar Technologies in 1994 and eventually as Trolltech Key features of the Qt library includes platform independence and a meta object com piler which allows for the use of programming concepts not present in C such as introspection runtime determination of object types and a signal slot system to allow for asynchronous input and output and event driven programming constructs By preprocessing the source code and attaching meta information to the classes programmers have the ability to safely connect multiple signals to multiple slots in different threads a feature common to many languages other than C 82 36 Other features of Qt that will be exploited in the new interface for TopMod in clude a robust main window architecture a multithreaded programming support Wacom Tablet support an OpenGL module an XML Module and internationaliza tion support 37 32 17 CHAPTER III METHODOLOGY AND IMPLEMENTATION My approach to designing and implementing a new user interface for TopMod involved removing TopMod s dependency on FLTK duplicating the old interface using the equivalent Qt interface widgets redesigning the entire interface structure to use a common tool options box and other more comm
26. ally all computer graphics applications provide some sort of user documen tation that attempts to explain the various functions of the application in an easily understandable format Maya comes with an entirely separate documentation server application that runs as a background process on a user s machine and provides en hanced searching capabilities for the entire contents of the user documentation Other packages such as Blender provide user and developer documentation through a web site and provide access to various parts of the documentation through links in the program In an open source collaborative application such as Blender it makes more sense to offer the documentation in a web based environment where users around the world can work together to develop it and even provide help in multiple languages 5 One example of a complex 3D modeling application that necessitates a friendly and customizable user interface is TopMod the Topological Mesh Modeler which is a topological mesh modeling system that allows users to create high genus 2 manifold water tight meshes Prior to this thesis the implementation of TopMod had a primitive user interface that was difficult for new users to learn and adopt quickly It lacked a clear hierarchy of windows menus icons and toolbars and did not provide any level of customizability It also did not allow quick access to the important operations in the program nor does it promote discovery of new or previ
27. arch engine indexing of new content In addition WordPress supports custom stylesheets and templating to allow designers to quickly and easily create unique presentations themes of their blog content With a basic knowledge of CSS and PHP and by starting with an existing WordPress theme a WordPress blog site can be customized in under an hour The TopMod blog features a dynamically generated horizontal menu across the top with access to the main areas of the site and two right sidebars which display various lists such as links to external web content about TopMod random images from the TopMod image gallery recent posts on the TopMod forum recently uploaded TopMod tutorial videos as well as recently tagged links from http del icio us with 49 the keyword topmod See Fig 33 2 Discussion Forum Web applications designed for holding discussions and posting user generated content have been in existence in some form or fashion since the 1980s and have been integral in developing and maintaining virtual communities centered around a specific subject matter Discussion forums dedicated to particular software applications have become somewhat of a necessity for even the simplest of applications Previously the only outlet for discussing issues and ideas related to TopMod publicly on the internet was through the Jotero Discussion Forum http forum jotero com which is run on the free open source phpBB forum softwa
28. bject elements vertices edges faces and features normals face centroids selection sets Other pieces in the interface that affect the visual display such as the camera field of view and the thickness of edges vertices and normals are also customizable through a graphical interface Adjustments to the visual display of 3D objects such as these are important for users with different types of vision impairments such as low vision colorblindness or amblyopia For example a user may perceive a 3D model better with a lighter foreground and thick dark edges and a darker background color or vice versa while others may prefer an orange to blue contrast between the object color and the viewport background based on the sensitivity of their eyes 2 lhere exist a myriad file formats for storing 3 dimensional mesh data and it is often desirable to work with the same mesh in multiple software packages This requires each application to have the ability to import and export data in at least one of many 3D file formats One of the most commonly used and widely support mesh formats is the obj format developed by Wavefront Technologies during the 1980s It continues to be widely supported across a large number of 3D modeling applications but is limited in its use for certain purposes such as rapid prototyping and interactive display on the web While there are a plethora of free 3D file format converters available on the web providing support for ot
29. click popup menu functionality complex computer graphics applications become much more efficient and user friendly lo make a piece of software available to the largest possible base of potential users it should be designed to run on as many operating systems and platforms as possible In the case of computer graphics applications it is often desirable to export data generated by one program for use in another program Many computer graphics packages are only available for one specific operating system such as Autodesk 3D Studio Max for Windows while others such as Blender are only available for Linux platforms OS X and Windows 1 Many popular 3D modeling applications provide users the ability to customize the user interface in various ways to allow for a greater level of efficiency with particular operations or work flows For example the interface for Autodesk Maya is written entirely in the proprietary Maya Embedded Language MEL which allows users to move various elements of the interface around the screen and even write their own interface elements with simple MEL script commands Autodesk 3D Studio Max offers a similar feature with MAXScript Other software packages such as Rhinoceros and Blender have similar features as well through the VBScript and Python programming languages In many cases the application is designed to remember a particular user s pref erences in terms of where various elements of the interface are plac
30. d in the OpenGL viewport which can be invoked at any time by hitting CTRL R on the keyboard the current extrusion mode which can be invoked by selecting faces and hitting CTRL 4 X the current selection mask faces vertices edges corners or none The second column of the HUD displays how many faces edges and vertices the current model has and it also calculates the genus of the model number of holes which is a function of the number of faces edges and vertices Lastly the third column of the HUD shows how many faces edges vertices and corners are currently selected in the model This information can be beneficial in combination with the variety of new selection routines described in detail below See Fig 15 C Selection Routines A large number of TopMod operations require some kind of sub object selection set in order to execute such as a single edge face or vertex or a multiple edges faces or vertices For example the DELETE EDGE command requires a single edge as an input and the EXTRUDE FACE command requires a single face In order to speed up the execution of various often repetitive operations such as EXTRUDE FACE I have provided a new set of selection mechanisms that allow users to select a wide variety of edges faces and vertices 21 1 Edges Some examples of TopMod operations that require edges as input include DELETE EDGE COLLAPSE EDGE and SUBDIVIDE EDGE The previous vers
31. e ABOUTTOPMOD DOWNLOAD TUTORIALSMELP DEVELOPMENT FORUM GALLERY WKI Main Page Namespaces Classes Files Related Pages Class List Class Hierarchy Class Members TopMod Class List Here are the classes structs unions and interfaces with brief descriptions AmbientLight BaseObject BaseObjectReference BasicsMode Camera Camera2 Choiceltem CommandCompleter compare ConicalMode DLFL DLFI DLFL DLFI DLFL DLFL DLFLFaceVertex DLFLLocator DLFL DLFLMaterial DLFL DLFLObject DLFLRenderer DLFL DLFLVertex DLFL Edge Editor Editor Private EditorCompletion EditorCompletion Private DLFL eqstr ExtrusionsMode DLFL Face GeometryRenderer GLWidget Grid DLFL HalfEdgePair HighgenusMode Light LitRenderer MainWindow Matrix3x3 Matrix4x4 mstriplet NormalRenderer OrthoCamera PatchRenderer PerspCamera DLFL Plane PointLight PythonHighlighter QShorteutDialog QShortcutManager Quaternion RemeshingMode RGBColor ShadedRenderer Ui ShortcutDialog ShortcutGetter SpotLight Ui StyleSheetEditor stylesheeteditor Texture TexturedLitRenderer TexturedRenderer TexturingMode TMPatch TMPatchFace TMPatchObject TopMod TopModPreferences Transformation UI ShortcutDialog UI StyleSheetEditor Vector2d Vector3d Vectorad Viewport WireframeRenderer Basics Operations including insert edge and delete edge Camera class from Chris Root used as an alternative to the original TopMod camera class Quick
32. e to allow others to borrow templates from existing mediawiki sites The BlenderWiki http wiki blender org uses Mediawiki as well and I was able to borrow a large number of page templates from them including templates for dis playing keyboard shortcuts tables and tooltips By starting from the BlenderWiki templates I was able to easily modify them to fit the needs of the TopMod Wiki and extend them even further to fit into other parts of the wiki The TopMod Wiki contains a wealth of information about TopMod and is divided up into three main sections the user documentation the development documentation and the wiki writing documentation See Fig 36 The user manual features pages that describe the new interface in detail as well as each operation There is also a model index a Python script index a tutorial index and custom templates for displaying models and scripts on individual pages See Fig 36 In order to show models on individual wiki pages without having to take screen shots or create rendered images of each one 1 found a Java applet known as LiveG raphics3D created by Martin Kraus that is used heavily on http www mathworld com that can display complex 3D models within the browser window and allows 54 the user to interactively rotate zoom and pan the model I have implemented a Me diawiki extension loosely based on the Quicktime Embed extension described above that allows this Java applet to be eas
33. ed for the next time the program is opened This allows the user to pick up quickly where he she left off in their previous work session without having to relocate windows and toolbars in the interface for the particular task at hand Keyboard shortcuts allow for quicker access to commands without having to use a mouse to access a particular graphical element on the screen In complex 3D modeling applications such as Maya and Blender keyboards shortcuts are essential to reaching a certain level of efficiency that is necessary in all steps of a production or content creation pipeline Moreover as users become more efficient with a particular software or portion of an application it is often desirable to create custom keyboard shortcuts that en hance the workflow for someone who uses a particular command very often that may not have a defined shortcut or may have a shortcut counter intuitive shortcut key sequence Allowing users to customize shortcuts for virtually any command or oper ation in an application gives an extreme amount of power to the users and it allows them to share their customized work flows or procedures with other users in the community Many 3D modeling applications also gives users the ability to customize the look of the user interface and 3D viewport displays in terms of colors and layout Features of this type of customization include changing the color of 3D objects the view port background lighting sub o
34. edious and time consuming to extrude every face by clicking on each one I implemented a new feature in TopMod that allows users to select any number of faces using the face selection routines mentioned AQ Fig 26 Example of a face selection set that is rind modeled all at once using the new rind modeling feature in TopMod above and then extrude all of the selected faces at once by hitting CTRL4 X or by pressing the Extrude Selected Faces button in the tool options window for each extrusion mode Now users can select as many faces as they want in a variety of different ways and extrude them all at once This drastically reduces the amount of time it takes to create extrusions on models in TopMod and makes the overall user experience much more interesting See Fig 27 1 New Approach to Other Basic Operators I also implemented similar features to the extrusion mode described above with other operating modes in TopMod For example users now have the ability to selected any number of edges and delete subdivide collapse them Face selection sets can be subdivided vertex selection sets can be deleted which will simply delete all connected edges These simple interface adjustments are extremely powerful when working on complex models and they allow for a much faster workflow 41 Fig 27 Example of a face selection set that is extruded all at once using the new extrusion feature in TopMod 8
35. ependencies namespaces and variables I have written a BASH script that will run the source code through the Doxygen processor using a custom HTML header and footer and CSS file zip up the generated HTML files and upload them to the server all at once This relieves developers of the task of doing each of these steps individually which can Main Page Toplod User Documentation it Topliod Developer Documsataton Pret curo Stang sn met Fen Teped News aplica Wii irse Documentar Tutorials E Tre Tua page hause permaner vs and tex hol a hav ove varus cons in Tod The gone ars etl th caeno nt Hon scan oh ih ar ito ach Cto to TopMod blip tv Video Feed rss Lis oui Ver que a ge ar Din m Heros Hr Introduction teats Gp Coning Arouna te erc me Ie esee n epi Basc Tenn byEun aman ary Equo Aleman ih dotes P byEQ Operating Modes ks p rem cline Seine Tow Sauermann p Remeshing Modes zs coming cn anual Python Seripting coming son Os Resources Models ppm Here you wind a catalog of models created in TogMod Feel tes to dd your er co rode Simp lh eus the Meta planda Fe pide E A your om clio as you so a5 nel pns Comes tm 2Twiting Soupes prem 3 misted Sous e omisi notis He Wre tad si Spur ci Fes Esse Miscellaneous mae an Eee Twirling Scupltures eag Inter
36. ess for faces 0 33 20 Screenshots illustrating the selection expansion growing and con traction shrinking process for vertices 33 21 Screenshots illustrating the selection expansion growing and con traction shrinking process for edges 94 22 ocreenshots demonstrating the process of cutting multiple vertices a A AA ee 36 23 Two of the advanced extrusion operators from Eric Landreneau s thesis research dodecahedral and octahedral used in conjunction with various remeshing modes Of 24 Screenshots of bezier patch models in the TopMod viewport 37 25 A series of wireframe models with different cross sectional dimensions 38 26 Example of a face selection set that is rind modeled all at once using the new rind modeling feature in TopMod 40 27 Example of a face selection set that is extruded all at once using the new extrusion feature in TopMod 41 28 Screenshot from TopMod with the Python scripting interface by a A Oh R TET 42 1X FIGURE Page 29 Screenshot from the Qt Linguist application 44 30 Screenshot of the TopMod interface translated into French 45 31 Screenshot of the Jotero Image Gallery by Torolf Sauermann 46 32 Rendering from the Jotero Image Gallery by Torolf Sauermann 46 33 Screenshots from the topmod3d org blog administration interface the plu
37. f the application The future work of TopMod will be in the hands of the user and developer communities created through http topmod3d org The discussion forum will allow for free exchange of ideas about how to make TopMod better and future developers will be able to build of the ideas of the community at large through the web site Qt allows developers to extend functionality in many ways including support for Wacom Tablet device input GPU shading with the NVIDIA Cg Toolkit multi threaded support and using hash maps as opposed to linked lists for the internal data structure This would significantly change the core of the TopMod code and the theory behind DLFL but it would ultimately increase the speed of the internal operations by a significant amount and would allow TopMod to handle even more complex meshes with more polygons Other future additions to the TopMod code that would increase extensibility and 69 Fig 49 Voronoi subdivision wireframe models created with a series of Python scripts and imported into TopMod usability include poly editing features such as translate rotate and scale for multiple vertices edges and faces support for multiple objects in a scene support for a scene graph such as OpenSG or a Directed Acyclic Graph data structure and a modifier stack A modifier stack would make TopMod more parametric by allowing users to go back to previously performed operations and change parameters t
38. file Other interface customizability enhancements include viewport coloring and gen eral display options such as wireframe color and thickness silhouette color and thick ness lighting color and intensity and the viewport background color See Fig 9 Using these color and line thickness settings users can create a variety of different viewport styles See Fig 10 lhe style of the general user interface elements and the application window as a whole can be customized through the use of the TopMod stylesheet editor The stylesheet editor allows users to select the native drawing mode of the widgets based on their preferred operating system style such as Windows XP Aqua CDE and Cleanlooks These styles can be further customized by using the text editor B TopMod Preferences vienport Background Mill ont intensity Object Render Color wireframe Thickness Cool ight Color EM vertex size Silhouette Thickness Warm Light Color Wireframe Color a Selected Vertex Size Silhouette Color B Selected Edge Thickness Patch Boundary Color Em Normal Thickness Selected Vertex Color jsm Normal Length 21 N a ate Fig 9 Screenshot of the color customization Soot ay M boom K Fig 10 Screenshot of different viewport dialog in the TopMod preferences window styles that can be created using customization options in the TopMod preferences dialog 22
39. from any location on a user s hard drive The program can be downloaded from the web site as a zipped archive file and copied into and run from any directory to which the user has access Qt provides a platform independent build system called qmake which allows programmers to store all the information necessary to build a particular application in one configuration file This file contains a minimal amount of platform specific build instructions and will generate the necessary Makefiles for Windows OS X as well as a variety of Linux distributions The configuration file for TopMod was written 43 to support Windows XP and Vista OS X for PPC and Intel based macs creates a universal binary Ubuntu and Gentoo Linux It can be extended to work on virtually any other Linux distribution with minor modifications as well By supporting a wide variety of operating systems TopMod is accessible to a much larger number of users and has the potential to expand its user base much more easily F Internationalization Internationalization is another highly requested feature of TopMod Through the use of the Google Analytics web site statistics tools running on http www topmod3d org I have noticed a large portion of the pageviews coming from the European Union specifically Germany Italy France and Spain In addition to these countries many of the previous TopMod developers come from other countries such as Turkey and India As with
40. fy within TopMod To ies more about Pyat visit 1 2 For installation instructions soe Manuel Inetaling Pya Je fi This page wes ast mocified 10 35 20 Juy 2007 This page has been accessed 52 tines ree TEENS Content is avaiable under GNU Free Documentation License 1 2 Privacy poicy About Tope Wiki Disclaimers aour Doa Manual Remeshing Doo Sabin as O Ti Maw Maal as lees The Doo Sabin ereshng scheme Be Examples o mon muna Cube rr a orrunty portal Recor oangee feb Donstons Los rsen Wrot inis rere Hood dE Tetrahedron ledit gory Tod 20 nue A nes TTE HERI Contant e avallsbe undar GNU Free Documentaton Licsn e 1 2 Privacy poly About Tophiog wisi Desam Models Cube with 3 Handles Models Hels Index Gunes Commands nan Dos Sann Remeating Face Loap Section Find Modein Tutorial een Downloads ien Qe Bi Domese oni rie 0 Category Male LISSE Resources Models Moebius Strip Checker m rT A Commands T m Mores pesimo Tutorial sh Downloads p pem L NT Resources Python scripts Below you will find the beginnings of a Script catalog for learning Python Scripting in TopMed To leam more about the Python Language please wit python orc You will also fnd the Manuel Python Scripting section ofthe TopMod wiki helpful Feel free o add yo
41. gin panel and the main page The main page style was adapted from the Big Blue theme created by Bob Jiwakacau 48 34 Screenshots from the topmod3d org forum administration panel the main page and an example forum post 50 35 Screenshots from the TopMod Image Gallery main page sample image gallery page sample image page and the administration panel 51 36 Screenshots from the TopMod Wiki main page user manual tu torials index model index script index and a sample operation DATO C hg A Se Wie A See ue wes Ga es Sd ee A 00 Of Screenshot from the TopMod source code documentation web page 56 38 Screenshot from the TopMod Google Code project page 57 39 Screenshots from the Google Analytics page for topmod3d org showing geographic usage data for Texas France and Germany over a two week period 2 leen 59 40 Screenshot of the old FLTK TopMod interface 61 41 Screenshot of the new Qt TopMod interface 62 42 A model created using the new version of Top Mod by Torolf Sauer mann 2007 http www jotero com len 64 43 A twisting torus model with stellated extrusions on each of the M ODECGIOS s aaa dels a a Ir ar o Gants Oe A A ee a A 64 44 A model created by simultaneously extruding a series of face loops with over OO 3668 opte a a a oh a ad 65 FIGURE Page 45 A model created by selecting three face loops containing more than 1000 faces and us
42. hat would change the result of all operations above it in the stack These changes will also require many changes be made to the core and auxiliary DLFL libraries Other additions and feature requests that have come in through the TopMod Discussion Forum include Voronoi subdivision scheme an option to extrude faces together a progress bar and a new set of menger sponge and sierpinski tetrahedra primitives See Fig 49 Thanks to the thesis work of Stuart Tett users will now be able to write Python scripts to further extend the functionality of TopMod and even generate custom in terfaces and controls with PyQt for interacting with and editing 2 manifold meshes TopMod also needs to be modified to handle 1 valence vertices dangling edges better than it currently does When a 1 valence vertex is encountered in a model and TO certain remeshing operations are performed the application will not respond and will ultimately need to be restarted To remove this error each function in the TopMod auxiliary library will need to be significantly modified to support 1 valence vertices 1 REFERENCES 11 B Saint Moulin 3d applications 2007 comparisons table http www tdt3d be articles viewer php art id 99 2007 Online accessed 2 Oct 2007 C Ware Information Visualization Perception for Design San Fransisco CA Elsevier Inc 2004 M Burns Automated Fabrication Improving Productivity in Manufacturing
43. he functionality of the interface and expose more of the internal structure of the doubly linked face list to the user In addition to the clear hierarchy of icons and menus TopMod provides more advanced interface elements as users become more comfortable with the program s functionality One such interface will be a popup command line interface for accessing all the program s operations from INSERT EDGE to SAVE FILE AS by typing the command The command line input will automatically complete the commands as the user types and will display a list of possible choices below the cursor based on the current input This will essentially allow every command to be accessed in less than five keystrokes without touching the mouse 1 Customizability Interface customizability is another common feature of 3D modeling applications and was an important factor in the redesign of TopMod As users become more comfort able with a particular 3D modeling application or any application for that matter they often use certain tools or toolsets more than others and may desire to reposition buttons or menus accordingly In the new version of TopMod the menus submenus and toolbars can be detached from their default location and placed anywhere on the screen to allow for faster access to specific commands and tools Another enhancement to the overall usability of TopMod involves saving files As TopMod contains many experimental features and algorithms that
44. her common 3D file formats within a specific application can be beneficial to speed up work flow and compatibility For example one common format with an extremely simple implementation that interfaces with rapid prototyping equipment such as 3D printers and fused deposition modelers FDMs is the Stereolithography or STL format 3 Another common format used for displaying 3D meshes in a web browser through a simple Java applet is the Mathematica LiveGraphics3D m file format 4 Like OBJ files STL and LiveGraphics3D files can be stored in a human readable ASCII format As computing hardware and software has become cheaper during the last twenty years many more users around the world are able to afford complex systems that can perform previously unthinkable tasks such as 3D modeling and video editing As a result there is a huge desire for popular computer graphics applications to be offered in multiple languages to cater to the needs of other cultures where English is not the main language or is simply not widely used Many software companies have re sponded to this demand by providing their software in other languages such as Google SketchUp which is currently offered in English French Japanese Spanish Ger man and Italian and Blender which is available in English Japanese Dutch Italian German Finnish Swedish French Spanish Catalan Czech Brazilian Portuguese Simplified Chinese Russian Croatian and Polish Virtu
45. ication available for Windows Linux and OS X It features an easy to use user interface with a series of context sensitive right click menus which allows the interface to be much simpler and easier to learn initially See Fig 5 12 amp Untitled Rhinoceros Corporate inl x RhinoScript loaded Loading Rhino Render version 1 00 Jan 18 2007 17 02 17 Perspective Vor 7 nen y Welcome Rhinoceros is a 3 D free form modeler you can use to create anything from a heart valve to a ship hull and from a mouse to a monster Right Getting Started tutorials Rhino on the Web 9 Technical support Classroom training 9 Rhino books and tutorials Plug in applications Download the latest service release Download The Zoo workgroup license manager 9 Tools for developers DEIS CABHORO bt 9 hk VOD B Defaut Snap Ortho Planar Osnap Record History Fig 4 Screenshot of Rhinoceros3D s interface Wings 3D Geometry 4 2681 faces selected Dutliner Geometru Graph Fig 5 Screenshot of the Wings3D interface 13 Untitled SketchUp Pro EVAL _ Sei A Fels E Ella sal Zmoci se txogtezaano 6e4 3 Bopa Pickface to push or pul Cir toggle create new staring face TIE AEE sa of saddle be 3 son s Hesht df m Width of 17 Thickness of ons f 157 alaui
46. ily embedded into pages on the TopMod Wiki I recently contacted Martin Kraus developer of the LiveGraphics3D Java applet with a proposal to extend the functionality of LiveGraphics3D to allow for synchro nization of the camera position and orientation for multiple applets embedded in the same web page We briefly discussed via email how the implementation would work and a few days later he Martin sent me the new version with the changes we had dis cussed I was not able to contribute to the code for the project as it is closed source but the new features I suggested have allowed me to create more understandable doc umentation pages on the wiki which show a before and after model that illustrates in 3D what a particular operation such as Catmull Clark subdivision does 5 Source Code Documentation TopMod was also in need of a method for storing source code documentation and a way for current and potential developers to access the same version of that documen tation To accomplish this task I chose a popular C source code documentation utility known as Doxygen http www stack nl dimitri doxygen Doxygen al lows C developers to write comments in different places throughout the source code for a particular project using certain keywords and character combinations that when run through the Doxygen processor can generate hyperlinked HTML files that thoroughly describe the object oriented class structure class and file d
47. in Bioinfor matics vol 4077 LNCS pp 287 298 2006 E Akleman O Ozener and C Yuksel Designing symmetric high genus sculp tures Proceedings Bridges 2006 2006 E Akleman J Chen and V Srinivasan Interactive rind modeling Proceed ings IEEE International Conference on Shape Modeling and Applications 2003 SMI 2003 vol 2003 2003 V Srinivasan E Akleman and J Chen Interactive construction of multi segment curved handles Proceedings Pacific Graphics 2002 2002 E Akleman E Mandal and V Srinivasan Soldifying frames Proceedings Bridges Mathematical Connections in Art Music and Science 2004 2004 E Akleman V Srinivasan Z Melek and P Edmundson Semiregular pentag onal subdivisions Proceedings Shape Modeling International SMI 2004 pp 110 118 2004 E Landreneau E Akleman and J Keyser Interactive face replacements for modeling detailed shapes Lecture Notes in Computer Science including sub series Lecture Notes in Artificial Intelligence and Lecture Notes in Bioinformat ics vol 4077 LNCS pp 602 608 2006 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 3 E Landreneau E Akleman and V Srinivasan Local mesh operators Extru sions revisited Proceedings International Conference on Shape Modeling and Applications SMI 05 vol 2005 pp 351 356 2005 V Srinivasan and E Akleman Connected manifo
48. ing the new crust modeling tool 65 46 A model created by Torolf Sauermann 2007 http www jotero com 66 AT A model created using the new version and the Python scripting engine by a user from the TopMod web community 66 48 A model created using the new version by a user from the TopMod Wep COMMUNIO x gue mai oem ed DAA REA Ros x uS 67 49 Voronoi subdivision wireframe models created with a series of Python scripts and imported into TopMod 69 CHAPTER I INTRODUCTION AND MOTIVATION To interact with any piece of computer software there must exist some form of user interface or front end to allow users to access important functions or algorithms in order to complete specific tasks The most common user interface design still used in the majority of desktop computer applications today involves a series of graphical W indows I cons M enus and P ointing devices collectively referred to as a WIMP interface WIMP interfaces are quite powerful for a variety of different software applica tions but are often limiting or obtrusive for more complex programs such as 3D modeling packages and interactive games For example WIMP interfaces tend to take up a large portion of the screen space that could otherwise be used to display complex data sets Compromises must be made in terms of how much screen space the interface uses and how much the data uses One simple solution to the screen space problem
49. ion of TopMod required the user to delete and collapse edges one at a time which required at least a mouse click for each edge that was to be deleted It is often desirable to delete series of edges in a model that share a connection based on the structure of the mesh such as a series of edges in a quadrilateral mesh that form a ring or a loop around part or all of the mesh I facilitate the operation of delete an entire ring or loop of edges by providing the user with an edge ring and edge loop selection routine which can be used in conjunction with each other as well as with other selection routines such as crossing window selection selection painting and a SELECT SIMILAR command An edge loop is a line of edges in quadrilateral mesh that are connected end to end Edge loop selections are obtained by checking to see if the first side of the selected input edge is connected to exactly three other edges and then selecting the edge which does not share a face with the currently selected edge T his process is repeated recursively for the current edge until it reaches the end of an edge which does not connect to only three other edges or until it reaches the original selected edge See Fig 16 An edge ring is a series of edges that are not connected but sit on opposite sides of a series of quadrilaterals Edge ring selection sets are obtained by first checking if the input selected edge is connected to exactly 3 edges on e
50. ith Maya and other software companies have begun to implement similar interface paradigms in order to increase efficiency and ease of use 28 25 2 Blender Blender is a free open source and cross platform 3D modeling and animation system that provides a rich set of features for advanced modeling animation and composit ing The interface is written using its own GUI library known as GHOST which renders all interface elements in OpenGL The GHOST user interface library is deeply embedded in the Blender source code and is not available as a separate library for use in other OpenGL applications 29 See Fig 3 11 1 Cube HE gt View Select Object Object 535 Pares e JaJo Mu v Link and Fig 3 Screenshot of Blender s interface 3 Rhino Rhinoceros 3D is a NURBS based 3D modeling application that is used in a variety of industries such as jewelry design automotive design architecture and multimedia design It was originally developed as a plug in for Autodesk AutoCAD and the primary input mechanism for executing commands is through a command line in terface or CLI The CLI features an auto completion mechanism which will suggest possible commands based on what the user types as they are typing This feature is similar to the way AutoCAD works and allows for faster access to a large number of commands 30 31 See Fig 4 4 Wings 3D Wings 3D is a free open source 3D polygonal mesh modeling appl
51. ither end and then selecting the edge opposite itself and checking again if it is connect to exactly 3 edges on either end This process is repeated recursively until an end condition is met such as a non quadrilateral face triangle pentagon etc or the selection reaches the original selected edge See Fig 16 28 Edge selection sets can also be obtained through a crossing window selection mechanism as well as through a selection painting function To obtain a crossing window selection the user enters the selection window operating mode and clicks the mouse in one area of the viewport drags it across the model in the areas where selection is desired Once the mouse is released through the use of the OpenGL viewport picking functionality the selection set will include every edge that fell inside the user s selection window See Fig 16 Selection painting is simply a mode where the user can click and drag the mouse over various edges in the model and have each one added to the current selection set Edges can be removed from the selection in selection painting mode by holding the CTRL key There is no simple way to prevent the mouse from selection edges which are not actually visible in the viewport so as the user drags the mouse around the screen edges toward the back of the model may also be selected Using the SELECT SIMILAR command edges whose vertices have the same va lence can be selected simulta
52. l and only manifold meshes The system is used primarily for architectural and sculptural design Since TopMod was first introduced myriad of researchers and students have extended its functionality 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 See Fig 1 As a result of the work and research of various students in the Visualization Sciences program at Texas A amp M TopMod now provides a wide variety of operations built upon the minimal set of operators These high level operations include extrusion remeshing planar modeling and high genus modeling The High genus operations result in meshes with a large number of holes or handles For example wireframe modeling is the process of converting the edges of a mesh into connected solid bars of a user specified thickness creating a lattice or truss like structure 21 For even the most basic operations on a mesh such as inserting an edge between two vertices the user must interact with a graphical user interface Ml DLFL Demo O xi File Edit Display Renderer Object Selection Grou High Genus Modeling y High Genus Modeli Ada Handle shape interpolatior y Number of Segments k A of IEA to Connect ILILLLLLET Weight 1 Bo MEELI Iv Symmetric Weights Weight 2 Extra Twists p NHLLLLLLEI Fig 1 Screenshot of the previous version of TopMod which uses the FLT K user interface library B Graphical User In
53. ld sierpinsky polyhedra ACM Symposium on Solid Modeling and Applications SM pp 261 266 2004 E Akleman V Srinivasan and E Mandal Remeshing schemes for semi regular tilings Proceedings International Conference on Shape Modeling and Appli cations SMI 05 vol 2005 pp 44 50 2005 E Mandal E Akleman and V Srinivasan Wire modeling Visual Proceed ings of ACM SIGGRAPH 2008 Siggraph Sketch 2003 M Muller Prove The core of information technology http www cs gmu edu cne itcore userinterface timeline html Online accessed 10 June 2007 A Fischer and K Lee Vision and reality of hypertext and graphical user interfaces http www mprove de diplom text 3 guis html Online accessed 10 June 2007 J Reimer A history of the gui http arstechnica com articles paedia gui ars 2005 Online accessed 11 June 2007 C Alt The materialities of maya Making sense of object orientation Con figurations vol 10 pp 387 422 2002 M Chignell and J Waterworth Wimps and nerds an extended view of the user interface SIGCHI Bull vol 23 no 2 pp 15 21 1991 R Rowe Gfx Alias wavefront maya 4 Linux J vol 2001 no 90 2001 14 28 G Fitzmaurice and G Kurtenbach System for accessing a large number of menu items using a zoned menu bar http www google com patents id WeEVAAAAEBAJ amp dq 6915492 2003 Online accessed 10 May 2007
54. locked Scupltures ed Checkerboard models eh Checkerbou Cube pli ty Q Wire Models teag Nested Sculptures teat Developable Surfaces ag Tower Structures fedi ER Q2 cx Ae Ul ABDUT TOPNOD Lori iur D RUM OA A Man Pago Resources Python scripts Comunity pertal Below you wil nd the beginnings of a Script catalog for learning Python Scriting in TopMed To leam more about w sry pacent enanoes the Python Language please vsit python orc l You will also find the Manual Python Scripting section of the Protect Random page TopMod wiki helpful Delte Heb Feel fea o ac your own scis simpy by following the conventions on the existing script pages Use I men SION a seen python gt python code nere lt source gt meme a i o umar EE psa lo embed a Python script into the viki pag Thal code wil produce tiis o bots Sci gt main ne loma t Sorptro Reference e pencas Development Upbad fie eae pect paes Gs Tiar primae verson sd Pormarert in A First Script Your fret Python Seriot Iram Cubical Extrude gt Your frst TopMod Python script ty wate y t remittere Remeshing IL o Doo Sabin Remeshing an example of how to do Doo Sabin remeshing in Python This helps proves thet the entire core code of TopMod can eventually be written in Python GUI Scripts with PyQt le FyOrExarle A simple demonstration of Pyt a vay to make GUI slemarts on the
55. mit 30 o ahs 30 1 s 10 10 10 SELECTION jet Coler for Seale 1 1 TOR 1 Fig 6 Screenshot of the user interfaces of Silo SLIDE Google SketchUp Cheetah 3D k3dSurf and Sculpture Generator 5 Other Applications There are a wide variety of other 3D modeling applications that provide unique in terfaces such as Silo SLIDE Google Sketchup Cheetah 3D k3dSurf and Sculpture Generator See Fig 6 D Pop up Command Line Interfaces Like the command line interface in Rhino 3D described above other applications feature similar interfaces for keyboard input and allow access to a wide variety of commands Quicksilver http quicksilver blacktree com a free application avail able for OS X from Blacktree Software that runs continuously in the background of the operating system provides a pop up command line interface that allows users to rapidly execute commands such as opening a URL launching an application manip ulating local files and sending emails and instant messages The interface can be invoked by hitting a simple keystroke combination such as 14 CTRL SPACEBAR and as the user types Quicksilver suggests actions or opera tions based on the types of plug ins enabled T here is a similar application developed for the Windows operating system
56. mod topological and mesh modeling 45 TopMod Fichier Edit VoirD Primitives EEES Outils Remaillage Fen tre Window Help O HM ew x e06 4 S lectionner Tout All A S lectionner Inverse 3l amp y 4 o ds dl Select Multiple fM A e T Q9 Select Similar es 69980244 Si eveggg e Grow Selection Options d Outils Cut By Edge Shrink Selection Effacer S lectionn 9 rv Offset 025 fel S lectionner Ligne de C t s OL Select Edge Ring OR Select Edges from Faces Select Edges from Vertices Effectuer Coupure S lectionr Face Loop oP Select Faces By Surf Area 3A S lectionner Face Damier SK Select Faces from Edges Select Faces from Vertices Editer Sommetx Select Vertices from Faces Select Vertices from Edges S lectionner Masques Y S lectionner Sommets Vertices V O S lectionner FAces OF v S lection C t s O S lection Coin Fig 30 Screenshot of the TopMod interface translated into French many people have discovered the software and have been using it and publishing renderings and images all over the internet As I began to work on the new version I gradually discovered more and more of a community of TopMod users from all over the world who were eager to see new features added and updates made to the interface especially through the Jotero Discussion Forum at http forum jotero com Torolf Sauermann who main
57. n more methods for obtaining interesting sub object selection sets and ultimately makes modeling in TopMod faster and easier A previous version of TopMod provided an edit vertex functionality added by Brian Barran which allowed users to select individual vertices and move them along all three axes I have recovered this code and integrated it into the new version as part of the sub object selection menus 4 Growing and Shrinking Selection Sets Another interesting and powerful selection mechanism I have implemented in the new version of TopMod gives users the ability to expand grow and contract shrink the currently selected sub objects faces edges or vertices The growing and shrinking methods work slightly differently for faces edges and vertices but they accomplish the same basic task 33 YH MES ELA AGS TES CXIII NO AE IEN SS Re ATER PERRY RSS ne eng RL WER a SAT id OK RA ORD SOURAV EE WEY YAY UA WR Wah Shy EA QR WR deri nee 4 A A X Fig 19 Screenshots illustrating the selection expansion growing and contraction shrink ing process for faces i BENS Y K ARANA SCOPE Od IN y He WW SOY ERA NS CU 7 QTY k O Fig 20 Screenshots illustrating the selecti
58. n web sites feature blogs that discuss new developments and other news regarding the particular piece of software such as http www blendernation com for Blender and the Google Sketchup blog at http sketchupdate blogspot com The BlenderNation blog uses the WordPress Weblog platform software while the Sketchup blog uses a Google blogging service known as Blogger http www blogger com I needed the TopMod blog to be integrated with the rest of the site and not sit on an external server such as http www blogger com so I decided to try out a few different open source blogging platforms The server where http www topmod3d org pointed to at the time of this writing provided sup port for PHP MySQL web applications so I was limited to trying out b2evolution WordPress ExpressionEngine and Nucleus After evaluating these web publishing platforms I decided to use WordPress for a variety of reasons First of all WordPress takes about five minutes to install on a PHP MySQL capable server and provides an extremely simple and easy to use administration interface See Fig 33 It is quite easy to create and edit categories for blog posts 48 Last 15 Posts Search Posts Browse Month Search August 2007 y Show Month Browse Category All gt Show Category Edit ID When Title Categories Comments eee tc escote rate io ario ptr ome repmevideoTutorials on biip cv Edit 2007 08 12
59. nar modeling or conical sculpting operators in TopMod The main operators implemented included CuT BY EDGE CUT BY VERTEX CUT BY FACE and CREATE CONVEX HULL All of these operations guaranteed the results to be planar which is quite helpful when unfolding or developing the surfaces onto 2 dimensional planes to be cut out of paper and folded back into physical 3 dimensional models The implementation of the planar modeling operations was incomplete and buggy and only allowed users to cut one edge vertex or face at a time In the new version I rewrote the user interface for planar modeling to allow any edge vertex or face selection set to be cut all at once by hitting the Cut Selected button or by invoking the shortcut key CIRL T This allows users to work much more quickly and easily with these tools and helps ensure that the new version of TopMod includes as much of the prior research as possible See Fig 22 2 Advanced Extrusions Eric Landreneau added a series of extrusion operators to a previous version of Top Mod as part of his thesis research that for whatever reason did not quite make it into the main version These included dodecahedral and an icosahedral extrusion mode that gave users the ability to produce some interesting organic forms After realizing that these features were not present in the most recent version of the software I con tacted Eric located the code that did contain these extrusion modes and
60. nation such as face loop selection select similar faces select faces by surface area checkerboard face selection and crossing window selection A face loop selection set is obtained exactly the same way as an edge ring except that the corresponding faces are selected instead of edges A face loop can also be described as being enclosed by two edge loops It is important to note that face loop selection primarily works for quadrilateral meshes but can yield interesting results with meshes that contain other types of faces See Fig 17 I have also implemented a routine which allows the user to select all faces in a model that have the same number of edges size as the selected face For example if a user selects a triangle while in select similar faces mode all triangles will be selected 30 immediately See Fig 17 Along the same lines there is a new routine that will allow users to select all faces in a model that have a similar surface area as a particular face If the surface area of a face is equal to or close to the are of the selected face within a user selected tolerance value then it is also selected This allows a variety of new patterns to be selected in one click as opposed to clicking once for each face See Fig 17 A Checkerboard selection can be obtained by recursively selecting all faces that share exactly one corner with the currently selected face This is a phenomenon that works
61. neously For example if a user selects an edge with a 3 valence vertex and a 4 valence vertex then the rest of the edges matching that pattern will immediately be selected Edge selection sets can also be obtained by converting a selection set of faces or vertices to the corresponding edges 2 Faces There are also many operations in TopMod which require faces as input such as Ex TRUDE FACE RIND MODELING SUBDIVIDE FACE MULTI FACE HANDLE CON NECT FACES and ADD HANDLE The previous version of TopMod allowed the user to select multiple faces for the SUBDIVIDE FACE and MULTI FACE HANDLE oper ations but these modes still required each face to be selected individually RIND MODELING also required the user to punch out each face individually which was 29 i i n OD ay Qd 7C gt C So SS N y Y f sd 4 S Hj R SA SAA gt NN O55 LATA ERR oS SI N ZA MUTT T RL SS ANS t NALES ON A WAY NX N KIS I D MA N Nas ROA EN ARA NCAA WS A CS X tease cee 5 NNSA F i WES NUS SES SSS SEA Fig 16 Examples of edge loop selection edge ring selection and crossing window selection quite time consuming for complex models In order to speed up the face selection process I have implemented a series of face selection routines which can be used in individually or in combi
62. oader plugin and a commandline upload script as well Developers can write custom stylesheets and templates for individual Gallery installs as well which allowed me to match the same style of the TopMod blog and discussion forum quickly and easily See Fig 35 02 4 User Manual 3D modeling applications do not often come without some sort of user manual and TopMod should be no exception The delivery format for 3D software user manuals differs greatly between applications however and it is important to be aware of the various possibilities Maya for example comes with a separate documentation application that actually runs as a local web server application on the user s machine This requires the user to install another application and requires a large amount of memory but provides amazing search capabilities and fast lookup Blender on the other hand offers its user documentation through a collaborative wiki software online This allows any Blender user to add to the documentation as they see fit and collaborate with others on how to approach documenting each piece of the program However this approach requires the user to be connected to the internet whenever they wish to view the documentation As high speed internet connections are quite prevalent all over the United States and the European Union this has not been a deterrent in Blender s decision to move all their documentation to an online wiki format 5 Other application
63. odeling operation in the new version of TopMod will be much more robust It will allow a user to select all the faces to punch out prior to ex ecuting the rind modeling operation Previously a user would execute the command and then begin to select faces one by one and if a mistake was made they would have to start over without the ability to undo With the newer face selection routines a user has the ability to undo mistakes and select complex patterns of faces on a mesh 62 pi 44 1 sar ALAPA e ile F 4 Viewport 5 Heads Up Display 6 Status Bar Fig 41 Screenshot of the new Qt TopMod interface much more easily One of the interesting changes to the viewport interaction techniques with regard to sub object selection is facial extrusions Figure 43 shows a twisting torus with 1280 faces that were selected simultaneously using the SELECT ALL command and extruded using the multiple stellate extrusion mode Previously this model would have only been possible by clicking each of the 1280 faces individually which would have taken a considerable amount of time thus discouraging the average user from even trying without knowing what the result would look like Figure 44 was created using a combination of the new SELECT FACE LOOP routine along with the multiple stellate extrusion mode Two face loops were selected as opposed to selecting over 1100 faces individually to achieve the same result 63
64. ogical Mesh Modeler Code Project Home Downloads Wiki Issues Source TopMod License GNU General Public License v2 Labels 3d mesh modeling topology opengl TopMod is based on a new paradigm that allows dynamically changing the O Ln i a EL CEE x topology of 2 manifold polygonal meshes The new paradigm always EE E guarantees topological consistency of polygonal meshes Show all J TopMod2 212 dmg Based on our paradigm by simply adding and deleting edges handles can TopMod2 213 zi be created and deleted holes can be opened or closed polygonal meshes Li 1 1E can be connected or disconnected These edge insertion and edge deletion E operations are highly consistent with subdivision algorithms In particular Links TopMod Home these operations can easily be included into a subdivision modeling system TopMod Research such that the topological changes and subdivision operations can be TopMod Wiki performed alternatively during model construction TopMod Gallery TopMod Discussion Forum TopMod demonstrates practical examples of topology changes based on this new paradigm and show that the new paradigm is convenient effective Blogs TopMod Blog efficient and friendly to subdivision surfaces Groups TopMod Developer Google Group Please visit the new TopMod homepage at http www topmod3d org to find out more and to download executable version for Windows and OS X i Project owners Join project dvmorri
65. om Quicksilver pop up CLI for OS X and Launchy a similar interface for Windows a a ocreenshot of the combo box interface in the previous version of TODWIOGE E o Gig ae A a ds we ae Gs A A Screenshot of the color customization dialog in the TopMod pref ETENCES m OON a dirae a a RU um 3 Screenshot of different viewport styles that can be created using customization options in the TopMod preferences dialog Screenshot of the stylesheet customization dialog in the TopMod preferences window 2 2 2 2 2 2 2252 2 ocreenshot of the shortcut customization dialog in the TopMod preferences window 2 2 2 2 2 2 22 52 2 Screenshot of the TopMod pop up command line interface Screenshot of the face selection mode right click menu vil Page 13 21 29 vii FIGURE Page 15 Screenshot of the TopMod heads up display rendered in the OpenGL VIOD go E aevum A aaa Be 26 16 Examples of edge loop selection edge ring selection and crossing WIAdOWSCICCuUON is ele ar ee Bo a de A a we G 29 17 Examples of face loop selection select similar faces select faces by surface area and checkerboard face selection and crossing window lecon measar he ee a o e cs ee ee ee A eS 31 18 Examples of converting vertex and face selections to edges 32 19 Screenshots illustrating the selection expansion growing and con traction shrinking proc
66. on WIMP interface elements instead of a series of combo boxes writing new sub object selection routines to speed up many of TopMod s unique modeling operations and consolidating previous thesis research projects into the new version This process also involved designing all displayable text in the source code to be localizable making sure the new version was portable and platform independent adding a diagnostic heads up display and creating a robust online community complete with user and developer documentation a discussion forum a news and updates blog and a public image gallery A Removing FLTK Dependency The first step in redesigning the TopMod interface was to remove from the source code everything that involved FLTK interface elements The FL TK based user interface of TopMod provided access to all of the operations through a series of combo boxes in the left pane the first which allows the user to choose a mode of operation including Basics INSERT EDGE DELETE EDGE COLLAPSE EDGE SUBDIVIDE EDGE COLLAPSE EDGE and SPLICE CORNERS Extrusions Cubical Icosahedral Stellate etc Remeshing Doo Sabin Pentagonalization etc High genus Wireframe model ing Rind modeling Multi face handle and Texturing After choosing the mode of operation another combo box would appear below with the list of operations for that mode See Fig 8 18 Extrude Cubical Extrude Extrusions Extrude Select Extrusion 0 Ext
67. on expansion growing and contraction shrink ing process for vertices To expand the selection for a single face on a surface all faces which share an edge with the selected face or faces will be included in the next selection set This process can be reversed by deselecting all the currently selected faces which have a neighboring face that is not also selected This will shrinking or contracting operation remove all boundary faces from the selection set See Fig 19 To expand the selection for vertices on a surface all vertices which share an edge with the selected vertex or vertices will be included in the next selection set This process can also be reversed by deselecting all the currently selected vertices which have a neighboring vertex through a shared edge that is not also selected This operation will remove all boundary vertices from the selection set See Fig 20 Lastly to expand the selection for edges on a surface all edees which share a vertex with the selected edge or edges will be included in the next selection set This 34 li m EE ESE ISSN RAR DER MAIS 1 RETA SNS NENA W YOY ORY WV Vy Y SY WONT E NY E QA 7 Y ee f N Fig 21 Screenshots illustrating the selection expansion growing and contraction shrink ing process for edges process can be reversed by deselecting all the currently selected edges which have
68. ously unused operations An early version of TopMod was available for Windows XP but the newest version only ran on Linux based systems There also existed no comprehensive set of documentation for users to learn how to use the program or for developers to promote future development As a result many users and potential developers were turned away from the program without ever being introduced to some of its most powerful features and its true potential The goals of this thesis are to provide solutions to these problems TopMod should provide a familiar and intuitive interface that resembles other popular model ing packages and functions in similar ways TopMod s source code should be open to development outside the walls of the Visualization Laboratory at Texas A amp M Uni versity and there should exist an online user community and comprehensive set of documentation for users and developers alike from which to learn how TopMod works on a variety of levels CHAPTER II BACKGROUND AND PREVIOUS WORK A Topological Mesh Modeling Akleman Chen and Srinivasan introduced a minimal set of operators for the devel opment of robust manifold mesh modeler represented by the DLFL data structure 6 a theoretical framework which guarantees topologically correct 2 manifold or wa ter tight meshes The minimal set of operators are INSERT EDGE DELETE EDGE CREATE VERTEX and REMOVE VERTEX Using these operators it is possible to cre ate al
69. pMod users typically select a crust scale or thickness value click the Create Crust button and being punching out faces one by one by clicking on them in the viewport Each face the user selects pokes a hole in the model This method of creating crusts proves to be quite time consuming for models with a large number of polygons as each face requires a mouse click Undoing a mistake required the user to restart the entire process from the beginning which happened quite often and ultimately discouraged users from the rind modeling tool as it took too much time and precision In the new version of TopMod I have redefined the process for creating rind models by allowing the user to select any number of faces on the model first After a face selection set is obtained the Create Crust button or shortcut key combination can be invoked which punches out all of the selected faces at once and reveals the crust This operation can be undone by simply hitting Undo and the user can start over See Fig 26 6 New Approach to Extrusions In the previous versions of TopMod users had the ability to extrude one face in the model at a time by selecting an extrusion mode and clicking on a single face After letting go of the mouse button the face would be extruded TopMod required users to click once for every single face they wanted to extrude For complex models of more than 1 000 faces it would be extremely t
70. pMod by Torolf Sauermann c 2007 http www jotero com model with stellated extrusions on each of the 1280 faces Fig 43 A twisting torus 65 Fig 44 A model created by simultaneously extruding a series of face loops with over 1100 faces Fig 45 A model created by selecting three face loops containing more than 1000 faces and using the new crust modeling tool 66 Fig 47 A model created using the new version and the Python scripting engine by a user from the TopMod web community 67 Fig 48 A model created using the new version by a user from the TopMod web community 68 CHAPTER V CONCLUSION AND FUTURE WORK With this new user interface TopMod users can create high genus 2 manifold meshes much faster and more easily than ever before as well as customize the user interface to their personal preferences to allow for an even faster workflow TopMod now has an official web site http topmod3d org that offers a wide variety of content and collaborative systems including a discussion forum a user and developer manual the TopMod Wiki a public image gallery a source code repository source code documentation a news blog and tutorial videos http topmod blip tv Users and developers alike can learn how TopMod functions on a variety of levels share content created and modified using TopMod and discuss issues bugs feature requests and even contribute to the future development o
71. quite well in conjunction with the Doo Sabin remeshing algorithm See Fig 17 Crossing window selection and selection painting is also implemented for faces but OpenGL allows faces which are not visible in the viewport to be excluded from the paint selection set unlike edges These routines are helpful for operations such as EXTRUDE FACE and RIND MODELING 3 Vertices Using the same process described above I have implemented a crossing window selec tion functionality for selecting multiple vertices This allows users to remove unwanted vertices from the model which effectively performs the DELETE EDGE operation on all edges connected to the selected vertices Users can also use the SELECT SIMILAR routine to select all vertices in a model with the same valence or number of edges connected to them I have also added routines that allow the user to swap the current sub object selection set for the corresponding set of a different sub object type For example a user may select a series of edge loops edge rings or face loops and convert that selection to vertices edges or faces depending on what is currently selected See ol select faces by surface area y Fig 17 Examples of face loop selection select similar faces and checkerboard face selection and crossing window selection pur wis Fig 18 Examples of converting vertex and face selections to edges Fig 18 This functionality provides eve
72. re After evaluating a variety of discussion forum software solutions such as vBul letin http www vbulletin com phpBB http www phpbb com SimpleMa chinesForum http www simplemachines org and many others available at http www forummatrix org I decided to use phpBB3 the current version at the time of this writing phpBB is free and open source and uses PHP MySQL server tech nologies Like WordPress it is extremely easy to install and configure and can be stored in the same database as WordPress by adding a table prefix such as bb phpBB also contains a robust templating engine that allowed me to copy the style I had previously created for the TopMod blog in a short amount of time The phpBB administration panel provides a number of advanced features such as forum pruning spam filtering user management and site statistics and the forum itself allows users to upload images 3D model files and scripts post quoting and styling etc See Fig 34 It also has a robust plugin architecture that allows developers to extend the functionality even further For example I have the ability to periodically generate 90 Administration Control l Panel Admin index Board index B 2002 2006 phpBB Group subSilver theme by Canver Software Fig 34 Screenshots from the topmod3d org forum administration panel the main page and an example forum post sitemap XML file
73. rning curve for new users and features a 15 lightweight memory footprint As a result of the smaller package size when used in executable applications however FLTK does not contain as many interface widgets and is not as customizable as some of its competitors Like other libraries it now contains bindings for Python and Ruby other object oriented programming languages 35 2 wxWidgets wxWidgets another cross platform C GUI toolkit was created in 1992 by Julian Smart and available free of charge under the permissive OSI approved WxWidgets license Unlike FLTK wxWidgets is a native mode toolkit which means it uses graphic primitives from each operating system to draw widgets but allows developers to create custom widgets as well It is also available in other programming languages such as Perl Python LUA Ruby Smalltalk Java and JavaScript 34 3 GTK GTK GNU Image Manipulation Program Toolkit or GIMP Toolkit was originally created in 1997 by Spencer Kimball Peter Mattis and Josh MacDonald as the GUI library for the open source GNU Image Manipulation Program It is available un der the LGPL license like FLTK and is written primarily for the C programming language It also has bindings for Python Java Perl Ruby C Pascal PHP Haskell Pike Tcl and various C NET GTK is cross platform and open source but it requires X11 libraries to run on OS X which does not allow programmers to exploit the unique G
74. rough developments by Silicon Graphics Alias and Wavefront Technologies who were all developing 3D graphics solutions for various industries such as high end CAD and product design to television commercial and movies By 1995 the companies would see their research in 3D computer graphics merge into a single company and a piece of software which eventually became known as Maya 25 The creators of Maya have continually added new user interface elements to enhance productivity and ease of use of their software during the last twelve years See Fig 2 One key feature which came about in 1999 with the release of Maya 4 that revolutionized the idea of the WIMP interface was the idea of the marking menu or hotbox 26 Marking menus basically allow the user to access all the commands that are normally present in the top bar of the application window directly under the mouse cursor simply by holding the spacebar key A transparent window pops up displaying a grid which allows faster access to hundreds of commonly used Maya 10 Autodesk Maya 8 5 untitled pSpherel Pon Damjana njee een vO as B m ET Ts EL po AN El Fig 2 Screenshot of the interface from Maya 7 on OS X commands 27 Maya also overrides the typical right click menu with a gestural marking menu that spreads the options out radially instead of in a linear list These interface elements have become essential to being efficient when working w
75. rude Face Doo Sabin Cubical Extrude Icosahedral Extrude Octahedral Extrude stellate Tetrahedral Extrude Double Stellate 1 00 ni F PL Fig 8 Screenshot of the combo box interface in the previous version of TopMod lhis type of user interface is quite tedious and restrictive and does not allow users to discover and learn how to use different operations quickly or easily All of the basic operations were buried below at least two combo boxes and required too much mouse interaction to access them Also the custom slider widgets used to set floating point values throughout the TopMod interface did not allow users to manually type in values when precision was desired and they made it quite difficult to slide to a specific value with a mouse B Qt Interface Design The new interface I have created for TopMod features an intuitive system of iconogra phy organized menu items a fully customizable interface with configurable shortcuts and style sheets that will allow the user to tailor their copy of the application to his or her specific needs This has been accomplished through the use of various features I9 of the Qt interface library Every operation or function in the program is stored in the code as a Qt action or QAction The actions are represented graphically in a variety of ways including toolbar buttons and menu items This action driven design allows other TopMod developers to easily expand t
76. s stuart tett vinod srinivasan ergun akleman Project members ozgur gonen onedanshow check227 ddrell alex fleming jacemiller84 2007 Google Google Home We re Hiring Terms of Service Privacy Policy Discussion Group Fig 38 Screenshot from the TopMod Google Code project page all the disparate features he repository needed to be hosted on a server outside the Visualization Laboratory network to encourage developers outside of the lab to join the project After evaluating a number of different solutions including SourceForge OpenS VN codehaus and Google Code I decided to use Google Code as it provided a fully functional Subversion repository as well as a bug tracking system a wiki and a package release manager that tracks the number of downloads for each release Another advantage to Google Code at this time is that it does not have distracting advertisements dispersed throughout the pages like SourceForge The managers of Google Code also provide a few handy Python scripts for bulk uploading release files which helps speed up the process of releasing new versions of TopMod The TopMod Google Code repository can be viewed by visiting http code google com p topmod See Fig 38 At the time of this writing the various releases of TopMod have been downloaded over 11 000 times worldwide IS 7 Web Site Usage Statistics Once the new topmod3d org user community was set up I needed a
77. s for submission to Google and other search engines and I can eventually provide a unified secure login system for the TopMod blog user manual image gallery and discussion forum in the future 3 Image Gallery Like many other popular 3D modeling applications such as Blender ZBrush and Silo3D the TopMod web site needed a system that would allow users to upload images of models created or edited with TopMod Many such web applications existed at the time of this writing including 4images Gallery by Menalto and Coppermine Photo Gallery After evaluating these and other image gallery web applications I decided to use Menalto s Gallery application because it was designed to run on a PHP MySQL enabled server was free and open source like the other technologies I have used so far and was highly customizable with a robust template and plugin architecture Gallery2 the current version at this time allows individual users to create their ol Fig 35 Screenshots from the TopMod Image Gallery main page sample image gallery page sample image page and the administration panel own albums make them public or private as well as upload images to other public albums It also accepts the widest variety of image file formats and allows users to upload in virtually any manner including from the web browser a mass upload java applet a Windows Explorer plugin a Picasa upl
78. s such as 3D Studio Max offer user documentation in a local help file chm and hlp which does not require internet access but limits the ability to collaborate with users on the process of documentation oince TopMod had little to no documentation before I began work on this thesis I had the opportunity to start from scratch with the entire process For an application as small and with as much room to expand as lopMod it is more important to allow users in the TopMod community to collaborate on the documentation than to allow users without internet to access the documentation so I decided to model TopMod s documentation after the Blender Documentation Project 38 I needed a free open source collaborative wiki web application that would be PHP MySQL 59 compatible and Mediawiki the software that drives http wikipedia org proved to be the perfect solution Mediawiki like WordPress phpBB and Gallery can be installed and configured in a matter of minutes and also provides a robust templating system and plugin architecture I was able to match the style of the TopMod main web site in a short amount of time and install and modify existing plugins to allow users to embed quicktime videos into wiki pages generate Google sitemap files and display custom RSS feeds The mediawiki templating engine allows users and developers to create cus tomized display templates for different types of data and all the templates remain open sourc
79. silver like popup commandline interface Conical Operations GUI elements Extrusion Operations GUI elements Functions for rendering edges faces vertices of DLFL Objects The OpenGL viewport High Genus Operations GUI elements The Main Window of the application A simple dialog used to set shortcuts on run time Generic shortcut management class Remeshing Operations GUI elements Texturing Operations GUI elements sd on 3 Aug 2007 for TopMod by 4 DEVELOPMENT FORUM GALLERY wki Main Pago Mamospaces Classes Files Related Pagos Class List Class Hiorarchy Class Mombors CommandCompleter Class Reference Quicksiver Ike popup commandine interface More List of all mer Public Slots nt exec causes the CommandCompleter dialog to popup end sets the focus to the text input bor Public Member Functions CommandCompleter Widget mm Widget parert 0 Qr V ndowlags t0 Private Attributes OLineEdit StiingList n 2 AutoCar QCompleter mCompleter the auioCompleton widget QLabel mQuickCommandLabel Short instructions displayed in the popup window StingListModel mModel tne completion mode for the AuteCompleterwiaget Detailed Description 3uicksiver lke popup commandine interface a popup Qui command ine interface for accessing all the functionality of TopMod oard input instead indCompleter prov Definition at line 31 of fie CommandCompleter hh Constructor amp De
80. structor Documentation CommandCompleter CommandCompleter QWidget m QWidget parents o Qt WindowFlags feo Constructor Parameters m dheaclionLis passed from the MainWindow class after each Mode class is instantiated parent the MainWindow parent widget f window flags for the QDiel tructor at ine 18 of fle CommandCompleter oc References mCompleter mLineEdit model mQuickCommandLabel anc mWoraList Nember Function Documentation int CommandCompleterzexec iniiae siot causes ihe CommandCompleter dilog to popup and seis the focus io the tex input box this dialog for now is model meaning no other windows will accept focus while this window is displayed ie the window if they do not want to input anyining or simpy nit enter er can hit escape Defrilion at ine 88 of le CommandCompleter hh Ref es mLineEdit and mWordList ed by MainWindow getcommand Nember Data Documentation GLineEdit CommandCompleter mLineEdit privstel single e input wioget Defrition at ine 40 of fle CommandiCompleter hh Referenced by CommandCompleter and exec QStringList CommandCompleter mWordList private ama of stnngs to reed to the Aut Defrilion at ine 41 of fle CommandCompleter hh ed by GommandCompleter and exec ACompleter CommandCompleter mCompleter iprivatel tne aut Definition at ine 42 of fle CommandCompleter hh Refi
81. tains the Jotero Discussion Forum as well as his own personal image gallery website at http www evolution of genius de See Fig 31 and 32 After seeing just a glimpse of the amount of 3D content on the web that had been created or edited using TopMod it became apparent that TopMod needed to establish a better presence on the web TopMod needed a new web page that provided many of the services other popular 3D modeling applications provide in order to serve current and future users of the software and encourage online collaboration and future P od b g P d 30 a Nan Fig 32 Rendering from the Jotero Image Gallery by Torolf Sauermann 46 AT development The new TopMod web page would need to offer a blog or news feed to allow users and developers to keep track of updates to the software a discussion forum to encourage communication about how to use the software and to report errors and give feedback an image gallery to display models made using the software and a user manual to teach new and existing users how to use all of TopMod s features Additional features that would be needed for the TopMod web site included developer s documentation a subversion repository to host the code and a place to store tutorial videos as a supplement to the user manual In this section I describe the various technologies used to create the new TopMod user community web site 1 Blog Many popular 3D modeling applicatio
82. terfaces Graphical user interfaces have existed in some form or fashion since the late 1960 s with the unveiling of Douglas Englebart s oN Line System NLS which consisted of a keyboard keypad mouse and windows 22 23 Since then major advancements in GUI techniques include Doug Englebart s on screen pointer controlled by a pointing device Xerox PARC s menu system dimming of inactive buttons and context aware cursors by David Tilbrook all introduced around 1975 Xerox PARC demonstrated the concept of popup menus as early as 1976 and hierarchical menus bitmapped displays dialog boxes and multiple fonts and styles showed up as early at 1978 1979 24 Other key advancements during the late 1970s and early 1980s include pulldown menus a main menu bar disabling of menu items move copy and delete commands tiled and overlapping windows the first commercial mouse scroll bars push buttons radio buttons check boxes and the ability to cut copy and paste with a mouse Silicon Graphics began shipping the first 3D graphics workstations in 1983 and around the same time MIT began developing the X Window system still widely used 22 25 C Existing Interfaces In this section I will discuss briefly some of the many 3D modeling applications available today that offer powerful modeling tools and unique user interfaces Maya One of the most popular 3D graphics applications in use today found its beginnings as early as 1983 th
83. ul online community of users and developers by integrating a variety of open source web based software packages The new website which includes a discussion forum a news blog a collaborative user and developer wiki and a source code repository and release manager received an average of 250 unique visits per day during the first two months of its existence and it continues to be utilized by a variety of users and developers worldwide 1V ACKNOWLEDGMENTS I would like to thank my committee chair Dr Ergun Akleman committee mem bers Dr Vinod Srinivasan and Dr Jianer Chen for all their help and encouragement throughout this project A special thanks to Dr Ergun Akleman and Dr Jianer Chen for formulating the theory behind the double linked face list DLFL data structure Dr Vinod Srinivasan for creating the original implementation of TopMod and all other TopMod developers past present and future including Esan Mandal Eric Lan dreneau Zeki Melek Stuart Tett Michael Stanley Ozgur Gonen Paul Edmundson Fusun Eryoldas Cansin Evrenosoglu Xu Bei and Brian Barran I would also like to thank my family for supporting me in all my academic and professional endeavors Without their continuous encouragement and support I would not have been able to make it this far Finally I would like to thank all the faculty staff and students of the Visualiza tion Laboratory who have helped create such an intense creative and fun learning en
84. uly 2007 16 VITA David Victor Morris Dept of Architecture c o Dr Ergun Akleman 3137 TAMU College Station Texas 77843 3137 dvmorrisQ gmail com Education M S in Visualization Sciences Texas A amp M University May 2008 B E D Texas A amp M University May 2005 Interests Web Design Programming Social Media Semantics 3D Computer Graphics Parametric Modeling The typist for this thesis was David Morris
85. ur ovm scripts simply by following the conventions on the existing script pages Use lt source 1an wchon pychon code nerec scurce to embed a Python script into the wiki page That code will produce this LP DEVELOPNENT Arce Decussen sey Protect Delete Move Unwatoh moser ips Fora Man Pago Community pertal Recent enanges Ransom page eb Donators seson e E Gey tool CS Sergiy Reference reneo canes Devebprent pad me Speci pages ers wols cid em T Punt version sau Pormaret A First Script Your fret Python Script a Cubical Extrude Your frst TopMod Python script ly ate ly cortito Remeshing A Ein Doo Sabin Remeshing an example of how to do Doo Sabin remeshing in Python This helps proves thet the entire core code of ToplMod can eventually be written in Python GUI Scripts with PyQt ect PyOL Example A simple demonstration of PyOt a vay te make GUI elements on the fy within TopMod To learn mare about Pyat visit 1 2 For installation instructions sae Manusl nstaling Py GNU PDE This pave wes ast medifed 10 35 20 Juy 2007 This page has been accessed 52 tines fi pues License Content is available under GNU Free Documentation License 1 2 Privacy poicy About TogMod Wiki Disclaimers Fig 36 Screenshots from the TopMod Wiki main page user manual tutorials index model index script index and a sample operation pag
86. vironment Another special thanks to Stuart Tett without whom I would not have learned how to debug my code all by myself He has been an integral part throughout the development of this thesis CHAPTER TABLE OF CONTENTS I INTRODUCTION AND MOTIVATION II BACKGROUND AND PREVIOUS WORK A Topological Mesh Modeling B Graphical User Interfaces lll sn C Existing Interfaces na 244 6 4 wok Xd dee oues a 1 2 3 4 WM Lc Pc BINAE ug uox suse RM E VE ELS m AE dE mS WS nno T AINE A um docu oW ce oia kem E ed Other Applications lll Pop up Command Line Interfaces GUI ESOS cud meu EG sr Aa ROS CS 0 04 e ee lt a ee oe E Ill METHODOLOGY AND IMPLEMENTATION A Removing FLTK Dependency B Qt Interface Design au uuum 6 ew Se PBOROw X Sew be ux d I Custom ZADY uuu iuuat ote es x e Bw 2 Popup Command Line Interface 3 Context Sensitive Right Click Menus de Heads Up Display arepas a o a C Selection Routines hz BOSE EA LEE DO ATTE da VOCS Y ty ari dra de oko ee e EUR el me n e 4 Growing and Shrinking Selection Sets D Thesis Research Consolidation Es Planar Modelni s qox wg fads Babe d TE Bae EE but 2 Advanced Extrusions rn Page OO 0O N N vi CHAPTER Page 3 Bezier Patch Rendering
87. well as others can be reached through the preferences dialog in the Edit menu TopMod Preferences ax Main Colors Shortcuts Stylesheets File Menu Export STL Print amp Edge List Save amp Patch OBJ Load amp Texture Export LG3d Sel Faces amp Save Print amp Vertex List Print 8Information Export LiveGrahpics3D Print amp Face List Save amp As Ctrl Alt Shift 5 Ctrl Alt Shift P Ctrl L Ctrl 5 Ctrl Shift P P Ctri Alt 5 Ctrl Alt P Ctrl Shift S Ctrl O 23 Save App Screenshot 9 Save Viewport Screenshot 0 E amp xit Ctrl Q Print amp CV List Primitives Menu amp Soccer ball Ctrl 6 amp Tetrahedron Ctrl 3 amp Geodesic Dome Ctrl 7 amp Icosahedron Ctrl 5 amp Dodecahedron Ctrl 4 amp Cube Ctrl 1 amp Octahedron Ctrl 2 E Window Menu Hide All ToolBars T TopMod Animated Help Shift H Tool Options Insert Edge o Learning Movies Show All ToolBars Shift T Extrusion Operations Octahedral Cubical Double Stellate Fig 12 Screenshot of the shortcut customization dialog in the TopMod preferences window 2 Popup Command Line Interface This new version of TopMod also features a popup command line interface CLI similar to the command line and auto completion functionality offered by Rhinoceros 3D The popup CLI can be invoked by hitting the spacebar key on the keyboard When the CLI is revealed in the center

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Morris - Texas A&M University