PicoGK 2 is out

[LinKayser]

Hi everyone,

I took some time over the last eight months to rewrite key areas in PicoGK.

As you've probably noticed, we use PicoGK extensively for larger and more complex objects (have a look at our Instagram).

One area that needed improvement was the memory management, which I rewrote.

The other area was the viewer, which needed more ways to zoom and pan to inspect complex objects more carefully. While the new solution isn't yet perfect, it's a big improvement over the v1 viewer (which I wrote in a week as a "placeholder" three years ago).

PicoGK 2 also lays the foundation for a future GUI in the viewer, which will allow us all to write more interactive apps. After a lot of back and forth, I chose the Dear ImGui framework as the base. It's well maintained (thank you Omar), fast, and while a bit unusual with its immediate-mode style, it is the best cross-platform framework I found that "just works". Not much to see in this release, but all the foundations are laid.

Another area that will be expanded in the future is creating some foundational geometry primitives that are moved from the Shape Kernel. The motivation will be explained in another post.

I hope to have time over the coming weeks to write some notes about how to use the new features. For now, see the release notes below.

PicoGK 2.0.0 is on NuGet as usual.

Lin

PicoGK v2

This is a substantial release, as a large part of PicoGK was rewritten and enhanced to provide a more robust basis for the future.

Core areas of focus for 2.0 were:

• Improved Memory Management. PicoGK now works with much larger objects and more complex projects.
• Support for non-global use of PicoGK objects (i.e. by instantiating a Library object for a limited scope)
• Foundational support for user interface (using Dear ImGui under the hood)
• A new viewer with improved interactivity
• Support for rendering bitmaps in the viewer (and visualizing slices)

Many of these areas will be extended in the coming months.

Release Notes

• NEW: A substantial amount of the PicoGK Runtime was rewritten and extended to support
  • Robust memory management and reporting for very large objects
  • Foundational work for a sophisticated user interface (based on the Imgui open-source library)
  • Images in the viewer
  • Performance enhancements for lattice operations and booleans by using new openvdb functions
  • Enhanced rendering support
  • Moved to opendb transformations for better compatibility with .VDB exchange
• NEW: Completely new Viewer with enhanced zooming, panning, intuitive navigation. Foundational work on adding a proper UI framework
• CHANGE: Entirely new memory management system
• CHANGE: PicoGK now requires OpenGL 4.1 Core profile
• NEW: Support for rendering text to bitmaps
• NEW: Support for 2D textures (bitmaps) in the viewer (GPUTexture)
• NEW: Each viewer object now can have its own rotation/translation matrix (in addition to each viewer group having one). This is preparation for assemblies.
• NEW: Added Frame3d object (similar to ShapeKernel's LocalFrame) to encapsulate a local coordinate system
• NEW: A number of base interfaces to abstract 2D and 3D paths and contours (PicoGK.Shapes)
• NEW: Support for visualizing exceeded overhang angle in Viewer objects (important for 3D printing)
• NEW: Added SliceViz to show sliced Voxels bitmaps in the viewer
• NEW: Added VoxCutViz to enable cutting Voxels and showing the slice bitmap at the cut intersection
• NEW: Added ILog interface to abstract logging of information and replaced rigid LogFile implementation
• NEW: Added IProgress interface and various progress reporting objects
• NEW: Added RemoteAllObjects to Viewer
• NEW: Added extraction of slices from Voxels in X and Y directions.
• NEW: Added Voxels.bIsEmpty to detect whether a voxel field doesn't contain data
• NEW: Added Voxels.bIsInside to detect if a position is inside a Voxels object
• NEW: Added fast function to create voxelized lattice beams Voxels.voxLatticeBeam
• NEW: Added function to create a shelled Mesh as Voxels object Voxels.voxMeshShell
• NEW: Library can now report memory consumption of all objects
• NEW: A number of numerical helper functions for comparisons
• FIX: Using multiple Library objects in sequence didn't work properly
• FIX: Slices were mirrored in Y, resulting in flipped CLI files
• FIX: PolyLine objects were not included in the Viewer bounding box calculations.
• FIX: Inconsistency between PicoGK Runtime and C# size about row order vs column order matrices (now consistently uses row order as does C#)
• CHANGE: Reorganized file structure with subfolders

[joshmelnykcroft]

Excited to give this a spin! Thanks for continuing to make this free and open source!

[rodrykthingol]

Thanks! Any chance of sharing a linux x64 .so version? Or if not, from where can i compile it from?