I have to admit I was coding a bit slowly this week - the FIRST robotics world championship (Go FTC 4290 and FRC 418!) is coming up, so I've been getting ahead on homework. But that doesn't mean I haven't been able to do much.
I've started manipulating the 3D meshes themselves. They're loaded into memory, where I calculate their bounding box (as before) and render them in 2D from a top view. Here's what it looks like:
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| First attempts at displaying a 3D mesh. |
The user can now open a file, see it to scale on screen, then drag it around. The light grey square is the build platform; anything the 3D printer can make must fit inside it. Thus the user is able to open multiple files and arrange them as he sees fit. Here I've opened a bust of Yoda and half a human brain. It works well.
Next week I'll start adding in slicing capabilities - the heart of the machine.