16 Jul 2001 NickElm   » (Journeyer)

I'm still here, burning the midnight oil (well, not really) while almost everyone else here at the Medialab are off on vacation and frolicking in the sun. Lucky for me, there isn't much sun to speak of here, and the weather is actually best suited for being indoors and working.

Disappointing weather aside, what is it that keeps me working here when I really should be off on vacation? My master thesis, of course. For certain reasons (more specifically, an attractive job offer), I need to finish it this summer (I will present it at the end of September), and so here I am, toiling away at 3Dwm for at least eight hours a day. It actually is quite fun, and I am getting a lot of work done.

My current order of business is implement CSG (constructive solid geometry) support in 3Dwm and integrating it with the 3Dwm scene graph. This is an interesting problem, and I am pouring a lot of time and creativity into my solution. Currently, I am thinking of using an object-based algorithm to generate an intermediate boundary-representation (b-rep) of the CSG tree (as opposed to an image-space one where you render directly from the CSG representation), probably with the use of BSP trees. This scheme will let me use hierarchical caching of the different components of the CSG tree, something that is very important in a distributed system as the 3Dwm display server.

Anyway, back to work! There are lots of polygons to split and vertices to generate.

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