News

• The current version of Togl in CVS contains code that enables this widget to run on MacOSX with Aqua, which opens the doors to a native MacOSX Aqua port of Ayam, first experiments (PNG, 211K) prove that this actually works, but many things need to be changed in order to make this port usable. Updated Makefile.shared and ayamConf.tcl files are in the works.

[21. Oct 2005]:

• The current CVS version of Ayam now contains two new scripting interface commands setProperty and getProperty that ease the management of property values for script writers. In addition, the forAll and forAllT scripting interface commands now maintain the selection.

• New in CVS is now a new NURBS tesselation and drawing mode called STESS (for Simple TESSelation). Support for drawing trimmed NURBS patches and shading of NURBS patches is currently still in the works, but a sample implementation back in the old Mops-V0.42d-days proved that this is doable.
  A highlight of this new drawing mode is that the tesselation is only done once and then cached. It is therefore faster but also of lower quality than drawing with the GLU tesselation. The quality of the new tesselation mode is automatically derived from the GLU sampling tolerance setting.

• New in CVS is a mechanism for cascaded script objects (a script object of type modify modifies the objects created by another script object of type create). An example of this can be seen in this screenshot:
  
  the example script object to bend curves bends a spiral created by the example script object spiral according to the shape of the white curve; the bending process may be controlled interactively by modifying the white curve!

• Linux: The Ayam libstdc++ archive has been updated to also include libstdc++.so.3 (for using the onio plugin on older distributions like Suse8.2) and there is now also a small shell script (ayaml) that sets the LD_LIBRARY_PATH variable and then starts Ayam.

• Ayam 1.8.3 is now available. This release adds Wavefront OBJ import (for polygons and NURBS), improves OpenNURBS (Rhino) import/export, adds UV coordinate import and export, and improves the usability of property GUI elements (instant apply).

• The CVS-Head has improved a lot on import/export, e.g. import of trimcurves and automatic merging of the way too many imported PolyMesh objects from Wavefront OBJ files; support for texture coordinates as "mys"/"myt" primitive variable tags has been added to Wavefront OBJ and Rhino 3DM (onio) import and export; in addition, Rhino 3DM (onio) export now handles PolyMesh objects.
• By the way, on this weekend the C/C++ part of Ayam passed the magic mark of 111111 lines...

• News from the CVS-Head: onio import now handles polymesh objects; Wavefront OBJ import now handles NURBS curves and surfaces. Ongoing work concentrates on import of trimcurves, support for texture coordinates (read as "mys"/"myt" primitive variables), and automatic merging of the way too many imported PolyMesh objects.

• Today Ayam successfully imported the first simple Wavefront OBJ file (PNG, 32K) .

• The list of frequently asked questions and the online documentation have been updated.

• Ayam 1.8.2 is now available. This release adds a Rhino 3DM file import/export plugin, NURBS conversion capabilities to all quadrics, rescaling of NURBS knot vectors, and script object controlled property GUIs.

• Since Ayam 1.8, the official Linux executable of Ayam seems not to be statically linked against libstdc++ anymore. This means that on some modern Linux distributions you may not be able to start the official Ayam executable; it complains that it cannot find "libstdc++-libc6.2-2.so.3". I am currently investigating this and the culprit seems to be g++-3.0 that does not link statically where g++-2.95.4 does (same link line used!). g++3.x has to be used for the AyCSG-plugin and OpenCSG so it is not an option to go back to gcc2.95.4. An option to get Ayam to run is to install the requested libstdc++.so (TGZ, 260K) locally to the ayam bin directory and adapt the LD_LIBRARY_PATH accordingly.

• News from CVS: onio plugin progresses nicely, reads and writes most NURBS now; Script objects can now create their own property GUIs. See this screenshot (PNG, 42K) of the spiral script GUI. A new example script for a script object with own property GUI is also available now.

• Since modern Linux distributions (like e.g. Ubuntu) do not have a libtiff.so.3 but libtiff.so.4, Ayam 1.8.1 for Linux is now available in a new binary that has libtiff statically linked.

• Ayam 1.8.1 is now available. This release focusses on major bug-fixes for the AyCSG CSG preview plugin and the inclusion of the new object type "Script".
  Happy modelling!

• The CVS-Head now contains a new plugin "onio" that uses OpenNURBS to read 3DM files written by e.g. Rhino.

• The download page now contains hotfix #1 for Ayam 1.8.

• The download page now contains a working aycsg plug-in for the IRIX platform.

• The download page now contains a statically linked aycsg plug-in for the Linux platform (that should be loadable on more different Linux distributions than the shared linked aycsg plug-in from the original Ayam archive).

• There are now four example scripts for the new Script object in the CVS-Head:
  • The first script demonstrates a Script object of type "Create" by creating a spiral curve. See a screenshot (PNG, 77K). Note how well the script object fits into the Tool-Object system, being directly usable as parameter object of a Sweep object. Note also that changing the shape of the spiral (e.g. its radius) is as easy as changing the line "set r 3.0" to "set r 5.0" and pressing the "Apply" button. Furthermore, by inserting just another line in the for-loop of the script, the shape of the curve can be made much more interesting (PNG, 70K).
  • The second script demonstrates a Script object of type "Modify" that deforms a NURBS curve according to the shape of a second NURBS curve. See another screenshot (PNG, 40K).
  • The third script also uses a Script object of type "Modify", this time to create optimized texture coordinates that will be written into primitive variable tags. See this image (PNG, 55K) for the effect of this, left: unmodified, right: optimized texture coordinates.

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