Freeze

Last week I put a freeze on development. No new features will be implemented in this system. The next phase of the project is testing. This week of coding is dedicated to making cosmetic changes and increasing reliability. Current features to wrap up include combining getting the dimensions and coordinate system of the stock material and creating a bounding box around the STL/TRI object and fitting it into the octree object.

The console based interface is getting updated to use GLUI. This puts a java looking panel in an openGl window. This plugs in nicely with existing code. The GLUI allows programmers to build buttons, panels, etc. manually with the same effect as with windows forms.

Force Rendering

The problem with force rendering was solved by changing a setting used with the SWIFT collision detection package. There are two options offered when creating the workspace for the collision detection. Sorting deals with the way the program sorts the objects to try to optimize the search.

Broad Phase offers the option to create tight bounding boxes around the object. This optimizes the query phase. If the object position is not inside of the bounding box, then no test is made and data will be returned from a query. This reduces the amount of computation by closely representing the object by the bounding boxes.

However, this causes a problem when making queries. There are various queries offered by the package and most allow the user to specify a threshold as to when the function should return a value. This doesn't work when the Broad Phase option is selected. When option is disabled, then queries return the distance between objects within the set tolerence.