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Polar 3D Point Structure from Cartesian Point Structure and back again conversion patches.Sometimes it's much easier to animate point data by modulating it's distance from a point (say origin point for simplicity). When dealing with a large set of points and using Javascript to convert ["X","Y","Z"] to ["d","theata1","theata2"] is pretty CPU intensive. It takes enough CPU just to adjust the values of the points you want that it would make sense to do the arbitrary co-ord system conversion inside two custom plugins. I guess OpenCL lends itself to this but I'm a) on Leopard and b) like the idea of a simple plugin to do this c) will find OpenCL daunting when I do get to it! d) hear OpenCL is unstaaaable at this point. One patch to convert point structure objects from [x, y, z] to [d, Θ1, Θ2]. Mess with d value on some of the points (or Θ1/Θ2 values if that's your thing). Another patch to convert from [d, Θ1, Θ2] back to [x, y, z] to be feed to Kineme Point Structure patch. I know it's not a good time to request new Kineme patches but I figured in a way it's quite a simple build (if you can do that sort of thing which I obviously can't) and it might interest somebody as an exercise. Conceptually at least it sounds easy!
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Specifically how large is your set of points?
We're working on a set of patches to perform data transformations like this in a fairly generic way. Hopefully we should be ready for an initial beta release within the next couple of weeks.
Also it's never a bad time to request new Kineme patches :^]
A few hundred points. Lots of colour, size modulation and more going on in comp though, so any place I can shave a few ms...
'Generic way' sounds even more interesting — I'm curious. May be able to use structure range patch to sub-set point structure followed 'generic changes' and by-pass javascript patch all together. Would need some way of assigning an expression to a value within the structure, not sure if that's in your thinking, it's already in another GL Tool patch I guess.
I've been wondering are the new faster struct types available to QC plugins are QC4 / SL only or do they work in QC 3 / 10.5?
Hey, now that DOES sound interesting! Have you found out how to use C-backed arrays in a custom patch? Are these the 'spreads tools' we've been talking about for ages?
Cool stuff!
a|x
Probably should have said 'Object' type or 'Class' not 'Struct', I think it's a Cocoa thing (as opposed to C) but I can't remember where I read about them. I think cwright mentioned they used them in the latest version of GL Tools or some other Kineme plug-in. Still, any plugin process using a programming language would probably whip runtime interpreted JS patch, no?
this would be a very useful feature, particular if there is a fast method to import and stream arrays into qc. I was dealing with largish point clouds in qc in the past (~5000 points[x,y,z,r,g,b]). Used xml to import and GL point structure to visualise. But this is quite slow.