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* This post needs a title
(TODO: a note to me, reading later: you don't need to give your
entire life story here.)
(TODO: pictures will make this post make a *lot* more sense, and it
may need a lot of them)
Context Free is one of my favorite projects since I discovered it
about 2010. It's one I've written about before (TODO: link to my
posts), played around in (TODO: link to images), presented on, as
well as re-implemented myself in different ways (see: [[https://github.com/hodapp87/contextual][Contextual]]).
That is sometimes because I wanted to do something Context Free
couldn't, such as make it realtime and interactive, and sometimes
because implementing its system of recursive grammars and
replacement rules can be an excellent way to learn things in a new
language. (I think it's similar to [[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/L-system][L-systems]], but I haven't yet
learned those very well.)
I've also played around in 3D graphics, particularly raytracing,
since about 1999 in PolyRay and POV-Ray. POV-Ray is probably what
led me to learn about things like implicit surfaces, parametric
surfaces, and procedural geometry - its scene language is full of
constructs for that. Naturally, this led me to wonder how I might
extend Context Free's model to work more generally with 3D geometry,
and let me use it to produce procedural geometry.
[[http://structuresynth.sourceforge.net/index.php][Structure Synth]] of course already exists as a straightforward
generalization of Context Free's model to 3D (thank you to Mikael
Hvidtfeldt Christensen's blog [[http://blog.hvidtfeldts.net/][Syntopia]], another of my favorite
things ever, for introducing me to it awhile ago). See also
[[https://kronpano.github.io/BrowserSynth/][BrowserSynth]]. However, at some point I realized they weren't
exactly what I wanted. Structure Synth lets you combine together 3D
primitives to build up a more complex scene - but doesn't try to
properly handle any sort of *joining* of these primitives in a way
that respects many of the 'rules' of geometry that are necessary for
a lot of tools, like having a well-defined inside/outside, not being
self-intersecting, being manifold, and so forth.
Tools like [[https://openscad.org/][OpenSCAD]], based on [[https://www.cgal.org/][CGAL]], handle the details of this, and
I suspect that [[https://www.opencascade.com/][Open CASCADE]] (thus [[https://www.freecadweb.org/][FreeCAD]]) also does. In CAD work,
it's crucial. I experimented with similar recursive systems with
some of these, but I quickly ran into a problem: they were made for
actual practical applications in CAD, not for my nonsensical
generative art, and they scaled quite poorly with the sort of
recursion I was asking for.
Implicit surfaces (or one of the many
equivalent-except-for-when-it's-not names for this, e.g. F-Reps or
distance bounds or SDFs or isosurfaces) handle almost all of this
well! They express CSG (TODO: link to CSG) operations, they can be
rendered directly on the GPU via shaders, operations like blending
shapes or twisting them are easy... for more on this, see [[http://blog.hvidtfeldts.net/][Syntopia]]
again, or nearly anything by [[https://iquilezles.org/][Inigo Quilez]], or look up raymarching
and sphere tracing, or see [[https://ntopology.com/][nTopology]], or Matt Keeter's work with
[[https://www.libfive.com/][libfive]] and [[https://www.mattkeeter.com/research/mpr/][MPR]]. They're pure magic and they're wonderfully elegant
and I'll probably have many other posts on them.
However, there is one big issue: turning implicit surfaces to good
meshes for rendering /is a huge pain/, and while many renderers can
handle implicit surfaces directly, Blender's renderers cannot. I
have other posts on this as well, but for now, take it on faith.
This is why I did not try to use implicit surfaces for this project.
(TODO: Make those posts.)
With these limitations in mind, around 2018 June I had started
jotting some ideas down. The gist is that I wanted to create
"correct-by-construction" meshes from these recursive grammars. By
that, I meant: incrementally producing the desired geometry as a
mesh, triangle-by-triangle, in such a way that guaranteed that the
resultant mesh had the desired detail level, was a manifold surface,
and that it was otherwise a well-behaved mesh (e.g. no degenerate
triangles, no self-intersection, no high-degree vertices, no
triangles of extreme angles) - rather than attempting to patch up
the mesh after its creation, or subdividing it to the necessary
detail level. For something similar to what I mean (though I didn't
have this in mind at the start), consider the [[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marching_squares][marching squares]]
algorithm, which is guaranteed to produce closed, manifold meshes.
(TODO: Illustrate this somehow)
The form it took in my notes was in sort of "growing" or "extruding"
a mesh per these recursive rules, building in these guarantees (some
of them at least) by way of inductive steps.
My meandering path to implementing it went something like this:
- Write some very ad-hoc Python to generate a mesh of a parametric
conversion of my annoying spiral isosurface from 2005 by breaking
it into planar "slices" or "frames", which move along the geometry
and then are connected together at corresponding vertices.
- Explore [[https://github.com/thi-ng/geom][thi.ng/geom]] and pretty quickly give up - but in the
process, discover [[https://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/summary?doi=10.1.1.42.8103][Parallel Transport Approach to Curve Framing]].
- Implement that paper in Python, reusing the basic model from my
prior code. (See [[https://github.com/Hodapp87/parallel_transport][parallel_transport]])
- Again continue with this model, allowing more arbitrary operations
than parallel frame transport, eventually integrating most of what
I wanted with the recursive grammars. (See
[[https://github.com/Hodapp87/automata_scratch/tree/master/python_extrude_meshgen][automata_scratch/python_extrude_meshgen]])
- Keep running into limitations in python_extrude_meshgen, and start
[[https://github.com/Hodapp87/prosha][Prosha]] in Rust - partly as a redesign/rewrite to avoid these
limitations, and partly because I just wanted to learn Rust.
- Realize that Rust is the wrong tool for the job, and rewrite
*again* in Python but with a rather different design and mindset.
(this is, of course, ignoring projects on various other tangents)
(TODO: Maybe split these off into sections for each one?)
Somewhere in here, I concluded that my fundamental idea was
half-broken. It half-worked: I was able to produce closed, manifold
meshes this way, and it could be tedious, but not *that* difficult.
However, all of my attempts to also produce "good" meshes this way
failed miserably.
(TODO: Can I find examples of this?)
A few of the same fundamental issues kept cropping up. One is that
the recursive rules I used for generating geometry (inspired heavily
by those in Context Free) were inherently based around discrete
steps, generating discrete entities, like vertices, edges, and face;
it made no sense to "partially" apply a rule, especially if that
rule involved some kind of branching. I kept trying to treat it as
something continuous for the sake of being able to "refine" the mesh
to as fine of detail as I wanted. Further, I was almost never
consistent with the nature of this continuity: sometimes I wanted to
treat it like a parametric curve (one continuous parameter),
sometimes I wanted to treat it like a parametric surface (two
continuous parameters), sometimes I wanted to treat it like an
implicit surface (with... theoretically two continuous parameters,
just not explicit ones?). It was a mess, and it's part of why my
Prosha repository is a graveyard of branches.
The recursive rules were still excellent at expressing arbitrarily
complex, branching geometry - and I really wanted to keep this basic
model around somehow. After some reflection, I believed that the
only way to do this was to completely separate the process of
meshing/refinement/subdivision from the recursive rules.
This would have been obvious if I read the guides from [[https://graphics.pixar.com/opensubdiv/overview.html][OpenSubdiv]]
instead of reimplementing it badly. Their [[https://graphics.pixar.com/opensubdiv/docs/subdivision_surfaces.html][subdivision surface]]
documentation covers a lot, but I found it incredibly clear and
readable. Once I understood how OpenSubdiv was meant to be used, it
made a lot of sense: I shouldn't be trying to generate the "final"
mesh, I should be generating a mesh as the /control cage/, which
guides the final mesh. Further, I didn't even need to bother with
OpenSubdiv's C++ API, I just needed to get the geometry into
Blender, and Blender would handle the subdivision via OpenSubdiv.
One minor issue is that this control cage isn't just a triangle
mesh, but a triangle mesh plus edge creases. I needed a way to get
this data into Blender. However, the only format Blender can read
edge creases from is [[http://www.alembic.io/][Alembic]]. Annoyingly, its [[http://docs.alembic.io/reference/index.html#alembic-intro][documentation]] is
almost completely nonexistent, the [[https://alembic.github.io/cask/][Cask]] bindings still have spotty
Python 3.x support, and when I tried to run their example code to
produce some files, and Blender was crashing when importing them.
Until I shave that yak, I am instead generating the mesh data
directly in Blender (via its Python interpreter), adding it to the
scene, and then setting its creases via its Python API.
TODO while I'm not so tired:
What is the aim of this post? To explain Prosha? To explain
current work, including Prosha?