[World] 3D Subdivision Fonts debut at the Libre Graphics Meeting

[Daniel Phillips]

Hi,

>From May 2-5 I attended the Libre Graphics Meeting in Vienna:

   http://libregraphicsmeeting.org/2012/

Many thanks to VMWare for permitting me to attend this important event (on 
company time no less) where I could meet developers and maintainers of key 
projects in the free media toolchain, as well as digital artists of 
outstanding ability.

While the 3D modeling sector was not well represented at this particular 
meeting (no Blender people!) the Freetype community and other projects 
involved with digital typography had a very strong presence. (The Freetype 
maintainer, Werner Lemberg, lives in Vienna and I had dinner with him.) So 
presenting the world's first 3D subdivision fonts at that meeting was just the 
right thing to do.

A few images for anybody who has not seen this:

    http://phunq.net/files/mesh96.png (extruded freetype outline)
    http://phunq.net/files/mesh97.png (subdivided mesh)
    http://phunq.net/files/shiny80.png (rendered)
    http://phunq.net/files/mesh98.png (extruded freetype outline)
    http://phunq.net/files/shiny81.png (rendered)

Now World Welder has a clear and practical direction: for the time being, 
let's concentrate on doing whatever needs to be done to turn World Welder into 
a useful tool for the specialized but highly visible application of 3D 
subdivision font mesh generation. There is not really very much to do, to get 
to that magic point where World Welder's 3D font plugin does something 
interesting and useful. In short, it only needs to do exactly what it does 
now, but with a nice way to specify such parameters as scaling and subdivision 
granularity. And it needs to export to other tools in the open source or even 
proprietary 3D toolchain. To me, that means Collada export, not a hard project 
at all.

There is also some robustness work to do, mainly to handle badly behaved fonts 
that may have duplicated control points and crossing edges. Some fonts have 
glyphs with edges that cross only when the Bezier curves are rendered as 
straight lines, or at low refinement levels. World Welder needs to do something 
reasonable in this situation, whereas right now it just throws an exception or 
renders with artifacts. What we want is to be able to throw any Truetype font 
at it and get reasonable results.

And we will surely want some nice screen widgets to control all this, so there 
is some QT work to do, which I have been looking forward to for some time. It 
is good that there is now a clear cut application to focus this work on.

I am also preparing to incorporate proper font rendering into the World Engine 
runtime library, as an extension of the current font outline library. This is 
with a view to removing the dependency on GLC (making the project a little 
easier to build) and improving the text render performance by an order of 
magnitude or two. More on that effort later.

There is a lot more to say about the Libre Graphics Meeting and how the 
progress of the World Welder may become intertwined with that community, which 
I will get into in a later post. There is no question about one thing: the 
Libre Graphics community wants to play with this shiny new tool. And when this 
tool gets into the hands of skilled digital artists, I expect we will see some 
impressive results that go far beyond the few simple demonstrations I have 
made so far.

Regards,

Daniel
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