Tamapolis: Javi Agenjo's personal blog

Today I have presented in front of an audience for the very fist time the work I’ve been doing for that last year and a half. It is a 3D editor entirely made for the web, using my own 3D rendering engine. It is called WebGLStudio.

Because it is still a prototype full of bugs I didnt want to promote it but now I feel more confortable sharing it. You can try it by clicking the screenshot.

I will make a better post about it with a tutorial video in the next weeks.

I hate when coding a neat web application I stumble uppon a problem where due to a poor standard there is no clean solution.

This weekend I was coding a planet shader for an idea I’ve been having lately, the problem when dealing with planet rendering is that you need very high resolution textures if you want to let the user get a close view.  So I searched and found some 4K textures perfect for my scene.

Click to see the WebGL Earth Demo

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One month ago Graham offered me to collaborate with him in one of his live coding performances. He does amazing music by coding live in front of an audience (no samples, no synths) using Supercollider.
He thought I could do the visuals using one of my tools, he would send me OSC messages and I can try to visualize them. So I took my old Simplecanvas web-experiment and tune it a lot so it can work in a real environment.

I wanted to talk about it before but I was waiting to have a video to show (we recorded the session), sadly the videos will have to wait a little bit, meanwhile just a heads up about the new features in Simple Canvas 2.0.

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I was superimpressed by this cool Javascript demo uploaded to the internet this past week by Philippe Deschaseaux.

JS1K Minecart Demo by @ehouais

It is all done in less than one kilobyte of Javascript code, without WebGL or libraries, and the result is very beautiful and intriguing, so I decided to analyze the code as I usually do to see If I can learn something from the author and It turned out the whole demo is full of great ideas. Lets check the code.

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After many years programming graphics in C++ I ended up having to code a big web project during a whole year, it was for the Barcelona World Race online game. Because the project requested lots of graphics and interaction I decided to do it in Flash, by that time I only had made some silly tests in Actionscript so I had to learn fast and not only the basics.

Barcelona World Race

The project ended up being a success with more than 50.000 registered users (surprising for a game so niche as the sailing games).

After that project I felt that Flash was a great platform, performance is good, the API is complete, the official IDE has all I could expect, and the projects can be deployed to web or desktop without any problem.

And then, WebGL came and I thought that it would be cool to learn it so I could merge my passion for 3D graphics and my passion for web development. And because to WebGL you need to know Javascript I became more and more proficient in Javascript.

I coded my own game editor in Javascript, silly weekend projects, even server side apps with Node.js.

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Today at work I had to do a cubemap visualizer that must work in iOS, so the only approach was to use HTML5 and the some of the new CSS 3D transformations.

I have done it already in flash using the 2.5 API so I thought it shouldn’t be so hard to rotate several layers 90 degrees and move them around. It turned out it was, because the origins are kind of messed up in the new CSS 3D API and I couldnt find a good documentation about it.

Drag the image around to see the panoramic image, although some old browsers probably wont show anything.

It works perfect in iOS and Chrome, not so well in Firefox.

If you want to use it, it is all wrapped in a simple Cubemap class in javascript, just include it and use it 🙂

Today I’m going to talk about a tiny web app I coded the last week to create images and animations programatically, it is called Simplecanvas.

Click the image to try it

The idea is to create images using simple functions like move or drawImage, and test the results instantly by pressing control+enter.

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