[tuhopuu-devel] Graphite Integration

[Chris Want]

Sounds pretty cool.  You will probably want to create a
separate directory to put your graphite stuff -- some external
sources go in 'extern', but if you are hacking your own
version to work with blender then it kind of goes
against the way extern has been handled thus far...
but deep down I don't think it matters too much where
you put them, as we can always move them later.
The only thing you might want to be careful about is
keeping the 'buildability' sane, i.e., if the graphite
stuff makes tuhopuu difficult to build for a lot of people
than perhaps offer an option to disable it.

Otherwise I'd say go for it, and have fun!

Chris

Brecht Van Lommel wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> I've been looking for ways to improve the UV editor, and there's still a
> lot of things to improve in the current workflow. But I've also been
> investigating more advanced tools, like relax UV, unfolding algorithms,
> seam cutting and texture atlas packing. There seem to be quite some
> algorithms out there.
> 
> I found that one of the most prominent researchers in this area (as far
> as I have an overview of it), Bruno Lévy, has released his application
> 'Graphite' under the GPL license: http://www.loria.fr/~levy/Graphite/.
> It contains many interesting and advanced algorithms for UV mapping. By
> integrating some of it's sources I think Blender could get some really
> professional UV mapping functionality. If you don't believe me, play
> around with Graphite's features, and see what it's possibilities are.
> 
> Also, there is a new algorithm coming, ABF++, that IMO is pretty awesome
> (already experimentally available in the Windows binary). It's really
> fast and still has the quality of the ABF algorithm. Combine this with
> them automatic packing of several islands into one texture atlas map,
> various UV map optimization algorithms (to minimize angular and length
> distortion) and an automatic seam cutting algorithm, and you'll see how
> useful this could be. The automatic seam cutting might not always give
> good results, but we would allow the users to define the seams edge by
> edge, as in the end only they know which parts of the mesh are important
> and which parts aren't.
> 
> It's hard to compare the Graphite algorithms to those found in
> professional UV mapping applications, as I don't know their algorithms.
> But I know the algorithms available in Graphite are pretty recent and
> IMHO really good. I think I'll ask the main author about this. Anyway,
> he offered to help, and thinks Blender is cool software, so that's quite
> alright too :).
> 
> The only problem I see is the size of the current code. Graphite uses
> it's own math library, and two external math libraries. I've already
> stripped down the code quite a bit, to about 4 MB, including the math
> libraries. I'll probably be able to lower it more, but it would
> certainly add up to the compile time and Blender binary size. Blender
> binary size went from 4.5 to 5.3 MB here, but I'm not sure everything is
> actually in there, I think the compiler might have left out unused
> parts. This could also be a good sign, indicating there are still many
> things that could be left out.
> 
> I find it important to minimize the amount of Graphite code in Blender,
> to be able to control it. It would be nice to integrate it without too
> many modifications, to be easily able to keep it in sync with Graphite,
> but it also shouldn't be a big amount of code that's not controlled by a
> Blender coder.
> 
> The positive side is that the code is very clean and modular, which
> would certainly make things easier to integrate and maintain. It's also
> cross platfom, because Graphite compiles on Windows and Linux.
> 
> Now, my question is, would I be allowed to try to integrate this code in
> the Tuhopuu tree? It might not work out, but I can at least try it in
> the experimental tree, right? I'm not sure how useful these features
> would be considered, since UV mapping is my current field of interest,
> and I might consider them to be more important than they actually are.
> Anyway, what do you think?
> 
> Cheers,
> 
> Brecht
> 
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-- 
Chris Want
Research Computing Support
Computing & Network Services
University of Alberta
Tel: 1-780-492-9418