rendering by unc

this is the first beta28 addonpack.

it comes with a bunch of new stuff by unc regarding realtime cubemapping, ie modules for conversions between different formats. and lecloneur spent you all a humble bundle of 30 TextureFX modules. just type his name into the NodeBrowser to see the list.

there is a new TypeWriter (String) based on original code by bo27 that should come quite handy for creating onscreen keyboards.

besides that a series of fixes and new nodes by yours truly vux and woei as documented in the change-log.

remember: everything thats in the addonpack (and more) is open-source: https://github.com/vvvv/vvvv-sdk

dear beginners,

with the rise of generative design (and a bit late) vvvv wants to get its share of the buzz. so in its long tradition of copying the best it gives to you:

Parasitic Design a series of demo-patches with detailed explanations that closely resemble the output of their originals which are the processing-examples that come with the book
http://www.generative-gestaltung.de
which btw. is available in english and french now!

over the course of the next few weeks we'll release most of the examples of their P chapter (>60) reimplemented as vvvv patches for your studying pleasure. they work nicer with the book at hand but also without the book you should be able to learn by just inspecting the patches.

looking through the examples you'll notice that some of them are not really suitable to demonstrate the strengths of vvvv. nevermind. those examples are there for all of us to find out more about vvvvs weaknesses. we left out only a few that we found too embarrasing to implement..

so the first 6 examples from the "Color" chapter are available from today. next week will see the drop of the "Shape" patches... subscribe to this contribution:
parasitic-design-a-vvvv-beginners-cookbook
to be informed of all releases.

muchos gracias go out to the patchers who spent countless hours on creating, documenting and cleaning the patches for you: roman_g, ridike and robotanton. plus special thanks for beta-testing and -critizism to anna. and an extra quad to the generative-design-team for their kicking us and the mention in the english version of the book. horray.

hope this helps,
yours devvvvs.

there're situations were one needs to create pins at runtime depending on the value of some config pin. for example consider the Expr (Value) node. it creates input pins for each given variable name.

with beta28 coming up this kind of task got considerably easier to do with a new interface called IIOFactory.
it basically provides a method to create so called IO containers, containing the actual "view" on the pin data (such as ISpread) and controlling the lifetime of it.

say we want to create an ISpread<ISpread<T>> during runtime, we do something like this:

[Import] 
IIOFactory FIOFactory;
...
var inputAttribute = new InputAttribute("Input Foo");
var inputFooContainer = FIOFactory.CreateIOContainer<ISpread<ISpread<T>>>(inputAttribute);
var inputFooSpread = inputFooContainer.IOObject;
...

in case we decide to get rid of those two pins which are used by inputFooSpread we simply call Dispose on the associated IO container:

...
inputFooContainer.Dispose();
...

for details and as a starting point have a look at the new dynamic plugin template contained in beta28, which creates inputs and outputs on the fly, when changing the associated config pins.

the easiest way to write a plugin with a texture output was by extending the DXTextureOutPluginBase class and overriding the CreateTexture and UpdateTexture methods. this approach lead to several issues though:

1. the plugin was limited to one texture output. if there was the necessity to have more than one texture output one had to go the long route by implementing IPluginDXTexture2 and doing the resource management manually.
2. it wasn't possible to reinitialize the textures on a slicewise basis. for example if the size of one texture changed all textures had to be recreated.
3. dealing with a pin of type texture was completely different than all the other data types. wouldn't it be nice to simply write ISpread<Texture> and be done with it?

well it's nearly as simple as that now. you can create a texture output by writing

[Output("Texture")]
ISpread<TextureResource> FMyTextureOut;

the TextureResource class takes care of the resource management, for example if a renderer is moved to another screen, the directx9 device changes and therefor the texture on the old device needs to be disposed and recreated on the new one.

the constructor of the TextureResource class takes up to four arguments:

1. some arbitrary user data which will be supplied as the first argument to the following functions
2. a function which creates the texture, taking as first argument the user data, as second the device for which a texture was requested and returning the newly created texture.
3. a function which updates the texture (optional), taking as first argument the user data and as second argument the texture to be updated.
4. a function which destroys the texture (optional), taking as first argument the user data and as second argument the texture to be destroyed.

so in order to create a texture we need to do this:

FMyTextureOut[i] = TextureResource.Create(i, CreateTexture);
...
Texture CreateTexture(int slice, Device device) {
  return new Texture(device, ...);
}

if we want to update the texture when some input changes:

FMyTextureOut[i] = TextureResource.Create(i, CreateTexture, UpdateTexture);
...
void UpdateTexture(int slice, Texture texture) {
  // Do something with the texture
}

and if something special needs to be done when destroying the texture:

FMyTextureOut[i] = TextureResource.Create(i, CreateTexture, UpdateTexture, DestroyTexture);
...
void DestroyTexture(int slice, Texture texture) {
  // Destroy the texture
}

in many cases the UpdateTexture call can be quite expensive, in order to disable it set the NeedsUpdate property on the TextureResource to false and set it back to true under a certain condition.

for a full example have a look at the rewritten dynamic plugin template.

oh and all this stuff works for meshes too, simply replace TextureResource with MeshResource.