Roadmap ideas

This page contains a list of ideas and suggestions for future development of the Possumwood project.

Possumwood application

Core system

• Undo framework (using native Qt functionality)
• Error handling
  • Return status for each node (returned by compute())
  • Visual representation of erroring nodes
  • Exception handling + tests
  • Add OpenMesh error handling
  • Node errors visualised in the error log only if a node is selected
• Parallel evaluation (possibly using TBB Flow Graph)
• Recompute on disconnect (as a flag - needs introduction of flags)
• Type traits
  • colours for datatypes
  • explicit "saveable" flag, linked to disconnect signal
  • readable type string, to be shown in a tooltip
• Interval attribute type
• Deployment
  • Windows (AppVeyor)
  • Linux (Travis CI)

Testing

• Add working examples for all nodes
• Setup a regression testing framework, based on examples

Rendering

• Refactoring of the OpenGL rendering as a "renderable" object
• Render modes as a dropdown in viewport
• OpenSceneGraph
• Lighting model / shaders (Disney model?)
• Bounding boxes, returned by all render calls, to allow centering
• Viewport centering
• Shadertoy-like fragment shaders, for drawing "background" or objects in the scene (returns x,y colour + depth)

UI

• Timeline support
• Viewport interaction (OSG?)
• Improve node connection / movement (only connect by dragging from squares)
• Add "minimized" mode for the graph display (to save space in the graph)
• Auto reorganization of the graph nodes
• Ordering of properties in the tree view (partial ordering based on the "order" in the graph?)
• TAB menu with search (same as Maya or Houdini)
• Clear log button

Plugins

Maths expressions

• Cparse?
  • unary/binary/ternary operators?
  • generic - add_variable/extract_variable/compute
• Python using boost::python?

OpenMesh

• Progressive meshes support + slider to test them
• Loading an .x file into series of meshes

CGAL

• Feasibility of replacing OpenMesh with CGAL?

Animation

• Setup a plugin and a semi-separate library (static?)
• Loading of BVH files
• Skinning of meshes
• Retargetting + remapping of animations
• Rigid skinning assignment (for "eyes" meshes of ishtarian proog model)
• Nonlinear animation editor
• Root bone instantiation (multiple methods + filtering?)

Shaders

• Simple "background shader" setup (similar to ShaderToy)
• Ground shader
• Simple GPU-rendered CSG (?)
• Separate attribute types:
  • vertex attributes (i.e., points + geom + stuff)
  • uniform attributes
  • texture attributes
• Dropdown for selecting GL version
• "Attributes" datatype, passed through the graph
• UI to show what attributes are available in shader editor
• Compositing shader framework
  • refactor drawing code
  • support for compositing shaders - screen-space ambient occlusion
• Port shaders to GL 3.x to support older GPUs
• Display accessible parameters as type-based UI
  • VBO objects, names and types
  • Uniforms
  • Vertex shader outputs

Docs

• New README
• A simple Youtube video introducing the thing
• Reorganize example files + add licenses
• Reorganize examples
• Rename and reorganize all nodes