Nurbs Workspace source code rev June 10 2011

[froo]

Here is the source code for the nurbs workspace plugin, dated June 10 2011.
This code generates a 'plane' type control surface and nurbs surface.
The edit-mode optimization is currently in work, so expect slow results and possibly
trueSpace crashes when using large nurbs surfaces.

A crash typically occurred during testing while using these settings:

control surface U and V: 10
nurbs surface U and V: 400

The current efforts are directed at resolving this issue and getting the optimization functioning
properly.

The debug and Intellisense databases for Visual Studio have been removed since they are
very large files. If this becomes an issue let me know and I can try to post them here,
or elsewhere and include a link for you.

[clintonman]

Thanks. I hope to learn a lot from it.

[froo]

Welcome clinton!
Please ask questions!
I am thinking about making a 'plugin Master Class', discussing
this plugin in particular. There are a lot of good things in here
that are applicable to many more edit-type plugins.

Two of the most important items are the selection and visualization streams,
and the 'lookup table' that is generated, in the code. The input selection and visualization
triangle streams are permutated (sorted) versions of the input triangle streams.
The table is used to discover the 'original' triangle index, in the un-edited input
triangle stream. Vertex stream is not sorted, in the nurbs plugin.

[stan]

Thanks Jason..the class idea sounds great..

[froo]

Sounds good Clinton. Thank you very much. Just curious; do you get
some good traffic to your site? Maybe there are more curious devs
out there (heh I like that: CuriousDev) that would like to dabble
and more, with the tS SDK. And that's the point of making this plugin:
for others to learn and make More plugins.
I think we'll have to sketch out a list of ideas for it then. Whichever
would be the most benefial / easy to work with.

Cool stan. I am not sure yet what approach to take: PDF file? screenshots?
video with voice? Video with voice may be good to get general ideas across
quickly. Skype? That's doable but may be hard to coordinate.

There's a lot of good stuff in that plugin. Note though that there are some
things I need to clean up; some obvious improvements need to be made;
for example, there is no need to set the lookup tables every single time
we enter GetMesh. That can be done once, then, only if we add geometry -
then an update is required. Another optimization is, since the Timestamp stream
tells us how many triangles have changed, we only care about updating that many
triangles in the output selection stream; not the whole thing. That is another
speed increase right there. I should say, that's another removal of a slowdown.
I'll make sure that is explained.

But I do think it would be good to have a live chat session about this if we can.
I have to replace my headphone w/ mike though (or fix it) since I tripped on the
cord and ripped out the headphone cable. Doh.