Showing posts with label user interfaces. Show all posts
Showing posts with label user interfaces. Show all posts

June 17, 2009

On the Right Trackball

 
And here is the completed spherical Trogdor (of uniform density?) You might notice a circle drawn across his beautiful Phong-shaded polygons; that's part of a virtual trackball. Roughly speaking, this allows you to rotate the model as though the scene were contained in a sphere. (Also: that site uses a rather inefficient way to get the angle between the two projected vectors - can you think of a fast approximation?) Other user-interface goodies: you can select individual joints and rotate them, causing Trogdor to coil up or flex his shapely back-arm. You can also move Trogdor around.
Just remember: if you hear from me only sporadically this term, it's because I'm doing super-fantastic-awesome things like modelling Trogdor and driving model trains. All in the pursuit of higher education!