freyja 10.x shader fun

The new shader editor is pretty fun. I may just backport it to the stable 9.5 branch if I get enough time. Here's a cute lavaish glow map. Yeah, the interface needs much improvement but the prototype is moving toward finishing up the Mesh and SkeletalMesh support now. Hopefully 10.x branch will be released in a few months with the new renderer, IK animation system, and visual shader editor. That's the problem with full rewrites you mostly restart from nil. Normally I think backporting is a waste of time, but the improved shader editor is relatively low hanging fruit.

10.x update

Well, I decided not to post the glow in the dark elves. Here's an inoffensive example of the new material editor so far in 10.x. The drag and drop visual shader editor is not implemented as yet, so I just wrote a a simple fragment / vertex program to do the specular and normal mapping. The kicker here is that you can load all the maps directly with pointing and clicking. Sadly my mouse batteries died today while working on this. The backup mouse is going to have to do while the batteries recharge.

Not a bad showing for a completely new implementation using the old interface. I'm going to make some emissive/glow maps for you guys to see some elven action later. I took a new screenshot with a better material, and replaced the ugly test pattern. :3

Update: Talking to guys on irc too long, so I decided to post some of dozens of shaders I wrote tonight with the new material editor since it was so fun.

freyja 10.x tracer update

I smell success! The tracer/skeleton/prealpha of 10.x is about ready for the new shader system. Hopefully I can use the remaining holiday hours to finish that much up. The 10.x build doesn't even have a new design for the UI yet, which makes sense since the branch was only started a couple of weeks ago. I'm experimenting with going all Lua for the front end and other avenues.

Please only report bugs for the 9.x series now as all major development is on the 10.x branch. Once I have basic animation and mesh editing for 10.x ready I'll post a 'preview' binary for it. Also of note 10.x only has a build system for Linux as of right now. There isn't much use providing Win32 and OS X build support until it gets to a usable state.

Right now 10.x has a stripped down 0.9.x UI with most all of the features ripped out of it due to the complete removal of legacy code in libfreyja and freyja3d ( the UI ). Therefore here's a pic of Yoko Kanno ( she smells like success ) until I get the new material system tracer done and some 'cool screenshots' to show for it.

freyja 0.10.0?

Yes, the 'private branch' looms over the current 0.9.5 public tree. Ready to pounce upon it's prey and take it's place as the new development branch. Will it happen before 2008? Stay tuned, kids. I've got pretty far with the new libfreyja 0.10 design, and I'm even working on the new C ABI for some of the new classes. Basically, the new design is very much grounded in by the book software engineering opposed to the crufty maintenance chaos in the 0.9.x branch.

What's changed? New Scenegraph, focus on parallelism, new rendering pipeline buffers, reduced interfaces to make writing plugins in C/C++ easier, and a general focus on using proper data structures everywhere. That's just the backend. I don't have any interface features to show for 0.10 yet, so just know I'm trying to make the magic happen before the end of the year. Expect the private branch to hit public svn with in the week.

freyja 0.9.5.17 final

They be patrolling, and they be hate'n. They trying to catch me covert'n dirty. Well, now that the Singstar hip hop intro is over... I got in a work around for a bug in Gtk+, so the release is going to go out with some minimal time/range slider UI elements. This is a development release after all, so you can't complain. Look for Windows and Linux binaries tomorrow.

I hope you like it, since for .18 you'll be getting a lot more use out of it with the new freyja animation system. I think I'll start testing UV animation next in the private branch, and maybe get a path animation demo up later.

Update:

Ubuntu Gutsy amd64 packages and the Windows zip are up. I'm having to upgrade a chroot I use for i386 package building, so that package architecture might be released a day later with the ppc packages. The amd64 ubuntu packages were pulled and reuploaded a few times today due to a last minute bug fix and network errors. If you had problems you might want pull down new packages, since the bugfix was for user data setup. Pretty important to run the application given how much scripting and plugins are used.

Again if anyone wishes to donate an OS X box for native builds I'll humbly except. I would love to support native Gtk+ instead of X11 on OS X. If you have OS X build problems report them, since I'm unable to test changes myself. :3

Bitches don't know about my animation scrubber.

Aw yeah. They don't understand my custom animation scrubber I wrote a couple hours ago. Not everything is 100% hooked up for high level events like marker control, etc -- but it's already scrubbing your worries away. No more horrible Gtk+ standard issue for this modeler. Also in tonight's svn commit are a crash fix for image buffer conversion ( stop using obsolete code ), Cmake fixes, and lots of little fixes here and there.

The 'final' 0.9.5.17 build should be done this weekend. I want to move on to the new scene/scenegraph backend for 0.9.5.18, so after I clean up the new scrubber prototype and a few more fixes that'll be it. If you want something not on the list of two items you'll have to beg and whine like dtm. I'm still not sure if cmake fixed their OS X linker bugs, but if not email me for a workaround.

Covert ops mission completed, so I'm getting a bit of sleep before the dawn. I was going to use this Bratz model someone sent me in the screenshot, but it's all creepy because it has no clothes. Time to catch some nightmares. If someone has some kick ass models that are animated send them in... I get tired of looking at that dwarf, elf, and pony one you know.

freyja 0.9.5.17 final coming

Well, freyja continues to move along at its own pace. I've redesigned the UI some more since the Lua rollover and fixed several bugs in the new Lua based client. As I move to a more 'professional' look and feel and 'unhide' functionality by providing better tool layout and grouping -- it's as if it's a new project altogether. Now that the Lua rollover is done I can focus on important usability and tool features. I should have all the skeletal -> morph tools back in the UI shortly. I just don't have time to make icons for all of them. Expect many bug fixes with the 0.9.5.17 final release this month. ^^

I'm still removing legacy systems while replacing them with more robust and easier to maintain code. Expect tons of backend and frontend changes for 0.9.5.18. The new animation control system will likely be the most important feature change. Finally you won't need to hassle with obtuse scrubber events, since I'm making a custom widget to replace the Gtk+ scrubber. I hope to work in a new path animation tool before the end of the year, which might bump the A/V sync tool. If you want to 'vote' for a feature drop by irc or email me to state your case.