My first post-doc job has now begun. I’m working with my PhD research group, exploring process-based form generation, whatever that means. In a nutshell, I will be developing a system for the real-time generation of 3D animated forms (think Panspermia, Turbulence, Werkkzeug, etc.).
We are currently leaning towards using Lua for the specification of the forms, and C++ and a bunch of libs (VCGLib, Boost, Bullet Physics, etc.) as the underlying engine. VCGLib is a library for manipulating triangular meshes, and comes packed with a tonne of mesh processing algorithms, i/o routines, etc. There are some alternatives (CGAL, OpenMesh, etc.), but at the moment, VCGLib seems like the easiest and most feature packed library. Some first tests, with VCGLib’s marching cubes algorithm and export routines, combined with interactive lua scripting, is shown below (be sure to watch it in HD).
In other news, I am working on a prototype for a new game. I’m keeping the idea to myself until I have a good prototype, but the game will be browser-based and have android/iphone ports. Here’s a peek at some early work in map layout. Note that the maps are being generated by code (javascript) running in your browser. All this stuff is written in Haxe, of course, assisted by useful libraries such as Polygonal.