I’ve started a journey to make Leaf more visual. You may have seen some of my videos about complexity, complete with shaky mouse drawn lines. It’s simply not good enough, especially […]
New Game: A quest for graphics (Leaf-SDL #1)
Yummy UI food with keyframe animations
When I saw the below demo I thought “neat, how’d they do that”? That may sound surprising if you knew that I wrote the API for this. In this article I’ll describe […]
Importing Blender object normal maps with permutations
We used a lot of object normal maps in RadialBlitz. Figuring out how Blender encoded these was part of the challenge. It didn’t seem to be documented anywhere, nor was I able […]
Stuffing curves into boxes: calculating the bounds
Now that we’ve drawn beziers and arcs there’s only one piece missing in the vector API. We need to calculate the bounds of the curve: the minimum/maximum points where it will draw. […]
Rendering an SVG elliptical arc as bezier curves
I needed to draw ellipses and arcs. A vector API just wouldn’t be complete without them. Though opinions seem to differ as Apple’s Core Graphics lacks anything but an axis aligned circular […]
The smooth sexy curves of a bezier spline
I’ve been dreaming and coding curves lately. They play an integral role in a vector drawing API, which I’m writing for Fuse now. “Bezier curves” are so common we might think it’s […]
Smoothing 3d geometry, like a tunnel, with Catmull-Rom splines
An endless tunnel is the centerpiece of my game Radial Blitz. Flying smoothly through this tunnel was important to me. That required both a smooth tunnel and a smooth camera. In this […]
What is a normal map? An object normal map?
Normal maps preserve the lighting fidelity of a high polygon count model when it is reduced to a lower polygon count. Model designers tend to work with models that are far too […]
Glowing graphics for that futuristic sci-fi feeling
Glow is a relatively simple effect that gives life to the graphics in Radial Blitz. It blends well into the sci-fi theme. Creating the glow requires a glow map, a second world […]
Radial Blitz – A rough journey from new technology to app store release
Finally, I managed to release my 3d action game “Radial Blitz” on iTunes yesterday. I encountered many obstacles along the way, but am quite happy with the result. In the coming months […]
Antialiasing with a signed distance field
When drawing basic primitives we want nice smooth edges. This means both pixel correctness and antialiasing. In my previous article about drawing a rectangle I showed how to use a distance function. […]
Combining several GL draw calls into one: a rounded rectangle
My previous article explains how I draw a rounded rectangle using a shader instead of tesselation. The biggest remaining issue is using eight calls to draw; one draw call would be much […]
Quickly drawing a rounded rectangle with a GL shader
Rectangles appear everywhere in user interfaces, from the backgrounds of elements to rounded border decorations. It’s helpful to be able to draw these fast. I set out to draw a rectangle with […]
Quelling the floating point demon in my line rendering code
A floating point demon had attacked my rendering code. Instead of drawing a nice straight line I’d get a devil’s tail flurried with barbs. It preferred disrupting the basic tests, straight lines, […]
