Design and Implementation of a Realtime 3D Graphics Server

Florian Paul Schmidt, Master's Thesis (German Diplom), supervised by Till Bovermann, Thomas Hermann and Helge Ritter, Faculty of Technology, Bielefeld University, Bielefeld, Germany, 2007

BibTeX entry, Download (pdf, 2.5Mb),

Summary

In this thesis ScGraph, a 3D graphics server for the SuperCollider framework, is developed. SuperCollider is an composition/audio synthesis framework which is used heavily in sonification research. The main focus of the design was for the graphics server to fit into the SuperCollider framework as seamless as possible to allow the development of visualizations and multimodal applications (combining dynamic visualization and sonification). The implementation is done in C++ and uses OpenGL for the graphics rendering. Close integration is accomplished by adhering to the SuperCollider OSC protocol. This way many of the tools available in SuperCollider can be immediately used in animations/visualizations. Furthermore some sample applications are presented which illustrate how to use the server.

Screen Shot

This screenshot (use your browser to scale the image to original size (1400x1050), e.g. by right-clicking and selecting "View Image") shows a typical SuperCollider/ScGraph session. The SuperCollider language interpreter runs as a child process of the famous emacs editor and communicates with ScGraph via OSC. Three distinct render windows are open, two of which (the middle ones) show different views on the same "scene"

Examples

Here you can find two videos (OGG/Theora files) which show ScGraph in action. The first one is a visualization of the IRIS data set and the second is a simple animation created while developing the server. For details on the first example, see the thesis (pdf, 2.5Mb)

Example 1: (Video (OGG/Theora), 3500kB)
Example 2: (Video (OGG/Theora), 1600kB)

References

Thomas Hermann, Sonification, 2007 (Link)
James McCartney, SuperCollider (Link)
Alan Watt, 3D Computer Graphics, Addison-Wesley Longman, Amsterdam, 1989

Contact

For questions and comments please contact Florian Schmidt, Till Bovermann or Thomas Hermann.

External Links

Florian's personal website (including open source software for linux as well as some selfmade music)
ScGraph ScGraph page on Florian's website (has some example code and a little more in-depth discussion of ScGraph)