SurfaceExplorer Files

Beta. Version 2.0 is still being tested. The stable version is v1.5.

New

Scenes: several surfaces of any kind together, each with its own motions, clocks and sound, under common lighting.

• A scene starts empty: after NEW, press Scene in the status bar and choose 3D, 4D or H³. The environment has no surface: it is the camera with its paths and rotations, the background, the sound and the 4D observer and light. Every surface is an object: add Shapes and geodesic flows with Add to Scene in the Library menu; they enter at the centre of the scene.
• Library during a scene: clicking a Shape or a Record shows a notice and leaves the scene as it is; NEW closes the scene. With the environment selected the Equations dock is off and textures go to the background.
• Objects dock (status bar → Objects): list, position, Duplicate and Remove; the docks act on the selected object. With an object selected, zoom and the 3D View buttons move, scale and turn it; with the environment selected they move the camera.
• Motions: camera paths and the environment's rotations move the whole scene; each object has its own GO rotations and its own 3D and 4D paths (3D View and 4D View docks, started with DEPARTURE).
• 3D and 4D scenes: in a 3D scene parametric objects stay rigid and ray-marched Shapes can be added; the environment's 4D rotations, 4D path and P± move the cut of the cross sections. In a 4D scene parametric objects turn in 4D and ray-marched Shapes cannot be added; objects with a P coordinate fit only in 4D scenes. Ray-marched and parametric objects hide each other correctly.
• Transparent objects are sorted pixel by pixel (up to 6 layers on desktop, 4 on phones and tablets), so linked transparent shapes pass in front of and behind each other.
• Timeline (Objects dock): the T slider takes the environment's camera motion to any time; In and Out make an object appear and disappear at chosen times.
• Sounds: one per object, all playing together and mixed in videos.
• START/STOP acts on the whole scene; RESET on the selected object, or on everything with the environment selected.
• Scenes tab in the Library: scenes are saved complete, the cut of the cross sections included, and new factory scenes combine every kind of object.

Scenes inside hyperbolic space (H³). A scene can now take place inside the space itself: the camera lives in H³, light travels along its geodesics and objects take its geometry.

• Starting: after NEW, choose H³ from the Scene button in the status bar, then add Shapes with Add to Scene. NEW closes the scene.
• Camera: wheel, pinch and the 3D View buttons move and turn the camera in H³; dragging turns the world around the centre. Camera paths, the environment's rotations, video and the T slider work as in the other scenes; RESET View turns the camera back towards the centre.
• Objects: parametric Shapes of every kind (equations, scripts, geodesic flows, tubes, multi-mesh), with border and wireframe, carried into H³ around their centre; tubes and borders keep the same thickness everywhere. Ray-marched Shapes cannot be added yet.
• Curvature radius (Objects dock, 0.5–50, default 2): smaller shows more of the hyperbolic geometry; very large makes the space almost Euclidean.
• Sky and light: the background is the sphere at infinity seen from the camera, and light follows the rays that form the image.
• Lattice {4,3,5} (Objects dock): the regular tiling of H³ by cubes, five around each edge; its slider sets the density.
• Orthogonal shows the space from outside, as the Poincaré ball, with every object in its true hyperbolic position.
• No 4D in H³: the 4D View dock and the ω, φ, ψ rotations are disabled until NEW.
• Not yet: H³ scenes cannot be saved, and two or more transparent objects may be drawn in the wrong order.

Poincaré Ball background shape (Renderer → Background): the sky of hyperbolic space seen from any point inside the ball.

Library: Cmd+click and Shift+click select several items without opening them, to act on all of them from the menu or by dragging. New factory presets: the scenes Transparent Overlap, Transparency Linked Tori and Test Sound, and an Ellipsoid path record in H3; the H3 and H2xR surfaces have been revised (the H3 Sphere is now the geodesic sphere).

Image (REC → Image): saves a PNG at the size you choose, rendered off screen, as in 1.5, with a warning when a scene may be too heavy for the device.

Installing next to 1.x (macOS): the app is now Surface Explorer v2 and sits in Applications beside the 1.x version instead of replacing it. On first launch it copies the 1.x settings, library folder included. If you installed an earlier 2.0 DMG, remove the old SurfaceExplorer.app; if you installed the 2.1 beta, remove Surface Explorer v2.1: its hyperbolic scenes are now part of 2.0.

iPhone: a single Docks button in the status bar opens all the docks as tabs.

Fixes

• Add to Scene: the environment's rotations no longer stop when the first object is added, an object enters at the size of its own Shape, and ray-marched script Shapes compile.
• Image colors: Display P3 and HDR photos used as textures came out dull or washed out; the file's color profile is now read.
• Scenes: Rename, Copy, Cut, drag and drop and New Folder work on scenes in the Library; scenes with only a background open without errors; Save Scene As suggests the scene's name; the Library highlights the right environment record and the selected object's sound.
• Objects: Duplicate names its copies Name (2), Name (3)…; Remove selects the previous object; dock fields apply on Enter (also on iPhone and iPad) and In/Out can be typed directly; an object's path starts and stops with DEPARTURE; a constant used only in an object's path unlocks its slider.
• Motions: START/STOP and T follow the environment's rotations, also in videos; the environment's rotation controls work while its path runs.
• Ray Marching and cross sections: Fast/Precise show the selected object's choice; the environment's 4D path, rotations and P± work whenever a cross section is in the scene; the T3 cross section no longer flickers.
• Transparency in scenes: transparent objects no longer hide each other or swap order depending on how they were created.
• Saving: when there is nothing to save the app says so; a background texture keeps its own colors and framing; choosing a texture in the Library asks to save only the texture it replaces, and an edited texture is no longer considered saved after another one is loaded.
• Empty scene: after NEW, START, RESET and Projection just say that the scene is empty.
• Image: thick wireframe lines follow CUTOUT holes and the nearest line wins at crossings; a failed render is reported instead of saving a blank picture; on phones and tablets a heavy wireframe no longer shrinks the image.
• Image and video: thin lines and soft edges, such as the Ray Marching Wireframe texture, keep the look of the screen in pictures larger than the view. Screen Upscale at a fixed resolution no longer stretches the video, and fills the whole frame on Retina displays.
• Very large images (over about 67 megapixels) now load as textures and backgrounds, scaled to 8192 pixels on the longer side; before, they were reported as possibly corrupted.
• Background shape: opening a Shape after a record with a Sphere, Cylinder or Cube background resets it to Fixed, so textures applied afterwards are no longer hugely magnified. Add to Scene leaves the scene's background as it is.
• Multi-mesh: a mesh in wireframe is always drawn opaque, and its own texture comes back when it returns to solid, without an unexpected save prompt.
• Constant E: in the Meshes field, the limits and the geodesic flow fields, E was always 2.718 (Euler's number) whatever its slider said; lowercase e is still Euler's number.
• Meshes in scenes: each object keeps its own Meshes value; typing on an object the number of the previous one now applies it.
• Roll Left/Right works on records with a camera path while the path is stopped: it rolls the path's view.
• Animated textures: a static texture that mentions t or iTime only in a comment no longer starts as animated.
• START restarts a scene's camera path also after changing a constant the path uses.
• Library: Paste Here appears on folders that have the same name as a file.
• Image: Wireframe lines starts from Normal every time the dialog opens.
• Status bar: on phones the Projection button is no longer cut off when it switches to Stereographic.
• Controls: checked checkboxes show their tick (they were a plain blue square), and number fields show their up and down arrows again.
• macOS DMG: it now includes Qt and needs macOS 14.4 or later; before, it stopped at launch on other Macs or asked for macOS 27.

Which file do I need?

• macOS 14.4 or later (arm64) — SurfaceExplorer-v2.0-macos.dmg