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A report on the progress on the animation project.

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A report on the progress made on the CG2 project.

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I’ve completed and posted the first couple assignments in my computer graphics courses (Computer Graphics 2 & Animation Algorithms). The first is a ray tracer built using python and the vector/matrix types from cgkit. Right now, it implements Phong and Phong-Blinn shading, with more fun stuff to come. For my animation course, I created a keyframing system built around cgkit.

Both proposals for projects (Snowballs & Snowfall) in both classes have been accepted, so expect to see some updates from those soon. I need to write two research papers as well, on topics currently unknown.

Deutsche Welle has started producing their own RSS feeds for their content, making my news feed obsolete. One can now find Langsam Gesprochene Nachrichten on their RSS page.

I just put the finishing touches on the first version of a Python script that screenscrapes a webpage on Deutsche Welle’s website where they post a daily mp3 of German news spoken slowly for learners and generates an RSS file complete with enclosures for the mp3s. I stumbled upon the page last week from Wikipedia article on learning languages and instantly thought it’d be a great application for enclosures and podcasting and all that stuff that’s being hyped nowadays.

Read more about the Slowly Spoken German News RSS Feed on its project page.

After my commit of pipelines to the Renderpack project last week, Jesse Wilson, the project owner offered to pass the job along to me. I accepted, so I’m the project owner now.

Woohoo!

I just committed some files to the Renderpack project that let a developer define a pipeline renderer for use with Swing JTables or JLists (or anything that can use TableCellRenderers or ListCellRenderers). This pipeline consists of a number of RenderStages, each of which tweak the output of the rendered value. There are some sample RenderStages included in the package that show off the the possibilties (cell striping, rendering dates, etc.), but I believe the real power will come from creating a custom RenderStage that, for example, uses some business logic to change the text color of all unpaid invoice, for example. RenderStages are plugged into a PipelineListCellRenderer or PipelineTableCellRenderer and can be reused anywhere in an application’s JTables or JLists.

Here’s a snippet from the demo application that shows how to render a date and stripe it with Christmas colors:

RenderStage[] listRenderers = new RenderStage[]{
     new DateRenderStage(”yyyy”),
     new StripedRenderStage(Color.RED, Color.GREEN)
};
jList.setCellRenderer(new PipelineListCellRenderer( listRenderers ) );

The main benefit comes from the fact that you can reuse the DateRenderStage elsewhere completely seperate from the StripedRenderStage on either a JTable or JList. Using stock Swing, you would have to create a subclass of TableCellRenderer that did the date rendering for JTables and a subclass of ListCellRenderer for use on JLists and then add in striping logic if you wanted that too.

The initial idea for this came from this post at ClientJava.com which links to the HighlighterPipeline API from JDesktop Network Components. That API was too heavyweight for my uses because one must use a JDNC component (JXList, JXTable, etc.) to use a HighlighterPipeline whereas with renderpack pipelines, you’re dealing with normal Swing renderers that can be put on normalnormal Swing components. The intention of JDNC Highlighters seems to be a bit different though in that they are meant to decorate existing renderers whereas renderpack pipelines are the renderer.

A jar that you can drop into your classpath and the full source are currently available from the renderpack webpage in addition to being available from CVS.