[PD] GEM GOP abstractions

[Chris McCormick]

Grtz,

I've been messing with GEM lately and have made a bunch of GOP
abstractions to make things easier. You can find then in the tarball of
my cvs which is at:

http://mccormick.cx/viewcvs/s-abstractions.tar.gz?view=tar

The gfx stuff is in the sx/ directory and works best if you include the
parent directory (s-abstractions/) in your path. You'll need the zexy
(for [repeat]) and Gem libraries.

I have always found it strange how GEM seems to be kind of backwards in
terms of the flow of data. In Pd you generally make a noise with e.g.
[osc~] and then run it through some effects, into your [dac~] where it
is output. In GEM it works the opposite way. You have to place all your
color, translate, rotate, repeat, texture "effects" before you put the
basic geom such as [cube], and the whole chain starts with the "output"
[gemhead]. To address this I've been experimenting with a method of
storing geometry in a [list] which is sent through geometry modifying
"effects" to an object [sx/blob] which draws geometry represented as a
list of verticies of triangles, to the screen. It's pretty crap and slow,
and I'd love to know if there is already a better way of doing this.

You can send arbitrary geometry from blender3d into puredata by using
the script in the utils/ directory. Copy it into your .blender/scripts/
directory and go File... Export... Raw Triangles across the Net...
whilst having sx/netgeom-help.pd open. You can't send very complex
geometry or the whole thing starts to chug pretty badly, but I think
it's a start for something better.

An example of an effect on geometry is the sx/explode patch which
translates all faces along their normals by some amount. This is all
done as [list] math so it's hellishly slow on complex geometry.

I am particularly interested to hear if there is a better, faster way of
doing this [vector level geom manipulation] that I don't know about. I
have been really inspired by the fijuu stuff and I would like to be able
to do similar kinds of mesh warping from withing Pd and GEM.

Best,

Chris.

-------------------
chris at mccormick.cx
http://mccormick.cx