Community Papermint Designs

Following the successful launch of VR Kitchen (News Feb 07), VR Bathroom is now available. Professional bathroom designers can use the OpenGL capabilities of their PC to show customers a high quality walk-through presentation of their new bathroom. VR Bathroom Pro employs a simple drag and drop interface for adding items from an extensive library of bathroom products.

INRIA is pleased to announce that Proland has been released as Open Source. Proland is a C++/OpenGL library for the real-time realistic rendering of very large and detailed 3D natural scenes on GPU. It is capable of rendering entire planets from ground to space. Proland is released under a dual GPLv3/commercial license. You can try it by downloading the precompiled Windows demo.

The Wine project development team has announced the arrival of version 1.5.4 of its Windows API implementation. Wine 1.5.4 adds a new resampler for Microsoft’s DirectSound software component and introduces support for OpenGL in the DIB (Device Independent Bitmaps) engine, part of the display subsystem.

Since 2006 we've been improving GIMP's user interface with help from Peter Sikking and his team at man + machine interface works. Some of the best improvements in GIMP's UI over past several years are the direct result of our collaboration.

We are happy to announce that for the next 10 weeks Marinus Schraal is joining Peter Sikking to work on a concept of a new widget set for tools' options in GIMP. The net outcome will be a functional spec for new UI elements that will be compact and easy to use.

By the way, recently Peter did another GIMP related interaction design course at the FH Vorarlberg, Austria. His students worked on possible new user interfaces for Liquid Rescale plug-in that implements content-aware scaling.

Cafu 12.05 is now available for download. Cafu is an open-source 3D game and graphics engine with OpenGL rendering. The new version 12.05 culminates three years of exciting work into a new stable demo release: It marks the completion and first release of the new Cafu Model Editor and many structural enhancements for game developers. The highlight of the release is the new Cafu Model Editor and the new models program code. The Model Editor answers the question: “How do I get my models into Cafu?” It can import many file formats and provides a graphical user interface for making Cafu-specific settings and adjustments to the imported model. The related new model code implements advanced features like automatic resource sharing, skeletal animation, seamless blending of several animation sequences, animation channels, skins, level-of-detail, submodels, GUI fixtures, and a lot more.

The Little Grasshopper has released a small PDF presentation designed for those who haven’t used OpenGL in a few years and wish to come up to speed.

Plumeria Smart Charts lets you create 3D applications in OpenGL for iPhone and Mac using flow charts. Plumeria Smart Charts was designed with three goals in mind - to make programming visual, expandable, and reusable. PlumeriaSC uses flow charts instead of a written programming language. This bridges the gap to allow beginners to use advanced techniques and features without the hassle of learning a computer code. The features include - an application simulator that launches instantly, only three flow chart symbols, WYSIWYG (what you see is what you get) no hidden programming inside the symbols, no data mining and analytics.

Shikoba is a C++ text library for OpenGL 3 and above using the FreeType 2 library. It fills a single GL_TEXTURE_RECTANGLE with a GL_R8 charmap and returns vertex and texture coordinate information for each requested glyph. The texture ID and glyph information never change and are valid until the destruction of the Library object.

Cg is a cross-platform shading language with a complete effect system for OpenGL, Direct3D, and console shader development. The April 2012 release fixes bugs in Cg 3.1.

The 37th installment in a series of tutorials dedicated to promoting modern OpenGL development on Linux, with a focus on version 3.x and beyond. This tutorial is the third out of three tutorials that introduce the subject of deferred shading.