In this update, I share.. some books I've been reading, to help me knock down a few barriers in my ongoing development of Hest. My current focus is on representing and rendering objects in space, so that includes things like: coordinate systems, affine transformations, cameras and perspective/ortho projection, vertex and fragment shaders on the GPU… and then carefully abstracting all of this so that the artist using Hest will have the right degree of control, and can (for instance) have objects that encode their graphics in various formats (eg: HTML, SVG, glTF) which all coexist in the same space, efficiently.

The face behind the pizza! 😛

I'm also looking forward to seeing the 3D. I've already got 3D animated graphics, and I'm interested in ways to make the programming interface more visual (right now programs are plain text). Integrating 2D and 3D in the same UI is something I'm thinking about.

My plan is to have the programming model be 2D, but embedded in a 3D space. This allows for a few things I think I'll like, such as: • Depth (with DOF/volumetrics to limit visual noise/clutter) separates different working spaces akin to tabs in a text editor. Switch spaces by moving back and forth through Z. I don't plan for this to be truly spatial — rather, spaces can come and go as needed. • Splines can be used to show connections between spaces separated in Z. Splines, like spaces, will come and go as needed. My goal is that, even if points can be "teleported" or "jumped" without wires, there should be a way to visualize the movement using a transient wire. Nelson's "show connections" is a Hest doctrine.

Jeez, going super deep! I have a similar 2D /3D model in my project. One thing the watch out for is aligning 3D objects to a 2D coordinate space - Perspective cams can really make the alignment difficult to see, especially if the cam can't rotate around object and can only pan/zoom. I've stuck with ortho because of this. Looking forward to seeing what you build!

This evokes the most excellent research question, "What does productive programming look like in VR?" 😄

@Ryan King — Great advice. On the one hand, I trust my instincts here, because I have a background in 3d animation. On the other hand, that means I've had more practice comprehending 3d spaces than most people. So this idea will either be something I can strike a good balance on, or something I need to toss out and take a different direction. One way to find out :)

Also reminds me of the Zoomable GUI stuff: https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/1316870 https://blog.codinghorror.com/zoomable-interfaces/

Yes! I'm building Hest initially just for my teammates, who make these zoomable interactive industrial simulations. So the design of Hest is, in many ways, an outgrowth of our design work on these simulations.

on the off chance you haven’t checked it out, 3blue1brown has a great series on linear algebra that i’ve been going through: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLZHQObOWTQDPD3MizzM2xVFitgF8hE_ab

Grant's video on the determinant was quite helpful to me.

I'm not familiar with this book (though I am quite familiar with the results of PBR, less so the techniques behind it). Thanks!

Impressive that it is free; however I'd still buy it, since I regard it as the best tech book ever written - and I have purchased each new edition. The fact that you can 'compile' the text of the book into a production-quality rendering engine is astonishing.

3blue1browm is great. I now somehow have a spacial understanding of quaternions ... I think

Ah, I stand corrected