SurfaceExplorer Files

Beta. Version 2.1 builds on the 2.0 beta and is still being tested. The stable version is v1.5.

New

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.

Scenes and backgrounds:

• Scene button in the status bar: after NEW, a scene starts from it, in 3D, 4D or H³; Add to Scene appears in the Library menu once a scene is started.
• The environment has no surface, in every kind of scene: it is the camera with its paths and rotations, the background, the sound and the 4D observer and light. Every surface is an object added with Add to Scene, at the centre of the scene. Clicking a Shape or a Record during a scene shows a notice and leaves the scene as it is; with the environment selected the Equations dock is off and textures go to the background.
• 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, which is saved with the scene. 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.
• Poincaré Ball background shape (Renderer → Background): the sky of hyperbolic space seen from any point inside the ball.

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.
• Saving textures: choosing a texture in the Library asks to save only the texture it replaces (surface, background, border or a single mesh), and an edited texture is no longer considered saved after another one is loaded.
• 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.
• 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.

Installing (macOS)

2.1 is the next version of Surface Explorer v2: installing it updates the 2.0 beta in Applications, keeping its settings and library folder. A 1.x version stays beside it.

Which file do I need?

• macOS 14.4 or later (arm64) — SurfaceExplorer-v2.1-macos.dmg