Michail Vidiassov

Dear John (and All), I am looking for something out of Asymptote gallery. For example Asymptote output (bezier patches and verstex shaiding) used in a published work (not one about Asymptote). To convince people some feature is worth including in a public format I'd better show that there is demand for vertexcolored NURBS, not just that there is one tool that produces such obscure constructs. "Supply will create its own demand" is an argument, but demonstrating existing demand is better. Sincerely,...

Dear All, please, point me at examples of something like smoothelevation.asy from Asymptote gallery, mesh of Bezier patches with per-vertex colors, put to some real use, interactive use preferred. The reason: a convincing use case may help to push vertex colored NURBS into the next version of X3D standard, making it a better future output format for Asymptote (when, FSM willing, I'll have time to modify my 3D PDF output routines to produce X3D). I can find examples of meshes of Bezier, NURBS, or...

Dear John, it seems you are looking at developing your own graphics format "v3d", since none of the existing offers necessary features. X3D looks like "3D PDF done wright" - public format, free tools, including editors, web integration via WebGL-based viewers, support for NURBS, but has the same principal limitations: no vertex colors for bezier patches and AFAIK viewers pre-tessellate NURBS. But now X3D format is now being updated to a new version and it may be worth your time to join the discussion...

Martin, "which propietary format do you mean, the quasi-internal .asy one" - no, I mean not Asymptote input format, but Asymptote output format. "WebGL has the added advantage of not requiring everyone to install some specialized viewer (that may even be hard to get for some platforms)." - but on the other hands: 1) Now John has to make the viewer (in JS/WebGL code). As he had made his own OpenGL viewer originally. And he has to deal with platform chages himself, as he had to rewrite his OpenGL viewer...

Dear John, 1) Why some proprietery v3d file format? Did you evaluate extending X3D with just your node, bezier patch with vertex colors? X3D has NURBS (but without vertex colors) and some WebGL viewers like x3dom or X_ITE have support for it, although rendering seems to be done once. All other primitives you need are in X3D, I believe. 2) Where can I find AsyGL library source to try to understand how it works and evaluate the idea of makeing x3dom extension based on it? 3) Uphill battle of adding...

Dear John, "Maybe Asymptote's webgl output format will be a solution for those users (coming this summer)." what is the general design of the WebGL output routine: do you work with "raw" WebGL, or extend some existing JS library with routines to handle your beloved remeshing of NURBS? What about export in some editable 3D format. I believe I can hack together X3D export with resilts similar to 3D PDF output (no per-vertex color, no remeshing). But if you internalise exporting problems and start thinking...

Dear John, "Note that OpenGL 3D graphics is no longer supported under the legacy 32-bit Windows Asymptote build" BTW Apple marked OpenGL as depricated in latest Mac OS 10.14 (September 2018): "Deprecation of OpenGL Apps built using OpenGL will continue to run in macOS 10.14, but these legacy technologies are deprecated in macOS 10.14. Games and graphics-intensive apps that use OpenGL should now adopt Metal." Sincerely, Michail

As far as I understand, John sets a rather high standard of having a true vector browser, so that curves ant pathes are remeshed into segments and triangles when something happens in theviewer, upon zooming, for example. That prevents the authors from exporting some 3D model and relying on its existing web viewers. IFAIK there was not much detail on their design choices on this maillist: do they intend to extend some existing engine, like three.js, or implement all low-level suff theselves in order...