ShellyLib News

• After a hiatus of some years, ShellyLib V2.3 has been released. The new version adds support for Wavefront OBJ and Web3D X3D as 3D output formats and TIFF as image format. The texture editor has now a macro recorder and recorded macros can be saved with ShellyLib data files. Some usability fixes in the GUI and generation curve editor and a port to MacOSX/X11 complement this release.

• The Shell Laboratory V2.2 Linux binaries have been recompiled with Mesa3.x and glibc2.

• The ShellyLib Home Page is now available from the domain http://www.shelly.de/.

• Redesign of shelly.core.de completed.

• After nearly a year without update of the ShellyLib Home Page here is what happened:
  • The Mops (the project I have been working on busily throughout the last year) has reached a state where it becomes usable. Please see the Mops Home Page for details.
  • The shell generation code from ShellyLib has been converted to a custom object for the Mops. This works the same way as the shell object for e.g. SolidThinking. All you ever might have missed in the Shell Laboratory (regarding transformations, working on many shells at once, more control over scenes etc. pp.) is now available in the combination Mops and Seashell custom object. Please try it out.
  • For registered users the custom object is available in a registered (but still alpha) version.

• ShellyLibV2.2beta1 has been released to a public betatest. Available on the download page.

• Ambient, diffuse and specular color of the shell, specularity and the background color may be set separately now.

• Fixed a bug, that prevented correct export of the rendered images, when the 3D-View was resized.

• The resolution of the sliders is now correctly set, when .shy-files are loaded. (In V2.1 there is a bug, that prevents correct loading of values with higher resolution, than the current resolution of the slider..., fixed.)

• The RIB-output now contains optimized texture coordinates, see this example (the left cone displays the new mapping, rendered with BMRT):
  

• Added support for 3DMF-NURBS. Not extensively tested, yet.
• Added limited (one-step) Undo to the texture generator.
• Added various keybindings to the 3D-View (toggle texturing and antialiasing and such...).

• Added support for 3DMF. Currently only triangles, though. This will change.

• Changed calculation of texture coordinates for the NURBS display mode. This improves texture mapping quality of shells with non uniform distributed control points.
• Antialiasing is now switched off temporarily, when rotating the shell with the mouse.

• Added antialiasing (using viewing-volume-jittering) for even more rendering quality. See these example images (left without, right with antialiasing):

  

• Added a status bar.

• Important! ShareIt! obviously mangles the name of the file, they send to registered users as registered version of the Shell Laboratory (they omit a trailing .zip). Anyone trying to get this running should simply add that extension and unzip the file. Sorry for any inconvenience...

• Updated compatibility section.
• Added image operations (mix, lighten, darken) to the texture generator. The new texture may be combined with the older one using this operations.

• Added a new parameter named alpha2. This works like alpha, but it gives you additional control of the growth rate of the generating curve. (In V2.1, both, growth rate and angle of the helico-spiral curve are determined by a single parameter alpha, making it really difficult to find right parameters for certain types of shells.)

• Successfully ported the Shell Laboratory to Solaris on an Ultra Creator3D (using SUN's free OpenGL libraries and Mesa headers).
• Added a portability section to the website.

• Display-problems on Win95-OSR2 may be solved using the latest OpenGL95 from MS.
• Added export scene feature for RIB output; all transformations of the shell and the view are supported.
• Wrote a new (simple) shader (SLtxtsrf) that maps textures on the shells, just like the Shell Laboratory.