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chsmith

blender 3D

Hi great squeakers, is it possible to create in squeak an app like
Blender 3d or is it better to stay with blenders system. I would like
to organize a school in Brazil where we will be teaching programing. I
want to teach around creation of a software app on a large scale that
is why I like blender 3D. Let me know all your thoughts.

Chuck Smith
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Casey Ransberger-2

Re: blender 3D

It's possible. Any large application will be a lot of work, of course.

Squeak supports OpenGL, so 3D is doable, but I've personally only seen it done in the VR forks (OpenCobalt and OpenQwaq.)

In OpenQwaq, you can even do a small (limited?) amount of 3D modeling from within the virtual environment itself.

On Dec 13, 2011, at 7:00 AM, [hidden email] wrote:

> Hi great squeakers, is it possible to create in squeak an app like Blender 3d or is it better to stay with blenders system. I would like to organize a school in Brazil where we will be teaching programing. I want to teach around creation of a software app on a large scale that is why I like blender 3D. Let me know all your thoughts.
>
> Chuck Smith
> _______________________________________________
> Beginners mailing list
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> http://lists.squeakfoundation.org/mailman/listinfo/beginners
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kilon

Re: blender 3D

In reply to this post by chsmith

Are you ready to code a 1 million lines of code application ? Because that is how big blender is. Sure maybe you can squeeze that because smalltalk is much less verbose than c to 250.000 lines. Are you still ready to do that ? And fight all the buginess along the way ?

Also if your goal is to teach programming then you will probably need to choose a more popular programming language as that will be the choice that your students will favor. Smalltalk as it is 10 times less popular than python (not only squeak that included the entire smalltalk products line), which means less community to ask tricky questions, less documentation which is the bread and butter for a developer and most importantly less mature libraries. Python in turn is 4 times less popular than the top Java and C .

http://www.tiobe.com/index.php/content/paperinfo/tpci/index.html

Of course all the above are estimates and should be taken with a grain of salt but they do reflect reality.

Personally I had to convert to Lisp for the above problems , but mind you, I still find Squeak and Smalltalk amazing for what they are and I think they are top learning tools because unlike anything out there they are user friendly and just tons of fun to use. I use emacs and silme with Lisp and I have used Eclipse and ALL the big IDEs out there, let me tell you something they are NO MATCH for smalltalk . Easily the best IDE out there. And of course I have not given up on smalltalk , this small treasure is hard to abandon. ;)

Even though creating an application like blender in smalltalk is pure insanity unless you got a big group of people to help you out, you can do tons of great stuff with squeak and as the previous poster said , there are definitely libraries out there to do the job for you. Additionally it seems that Squeak can interface relatively easy with C and that opens for you a whole galaxy of options and solves the above problems too. Unfortunately that means that you will have teach C too to your students , well at least the basic, but of course there are benefits there too since 3d and C go hand in hand.

In the end its completely up to what you want to do, in any case one thing I advice is never , never , never understimate how difficult simple things can be ;) That's what divides theory from practice ;)

Have fun and keeps us posted with your progress.

From: "[hidden email]" <[hidden email]>
To: [hidden email]
Sent: Tuesday, 13 December 2011, 17:00
Subject: [Newbies] blender 3D

Hi great squeakers, is it possible to create in squeak an app like Blender 3d or is it better to stay with blenders system. I would like to organize a school in Brazil where we will be teaching programing. I want to teach around creation of a software app on a large scale that is why I like blender 3D. Let me know all your thoughts.

Chuck Smith
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LawsonEnglish

Re: blender 3D

In reply to this post by chsmith

I've been playing a tiny bit with OpenGL and squeak. I haven't really
created "real" tutorials for it yet, but you can browse my squeak OpenGL
videos and get a feel for what is possible:
http://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLD60480623B5B1382&feature=view_all

L.

On 12/13/11 8:00 AM, [hidden email] wrote:

> Hi great squeakers, is it possible to create in squeak an app like
> Blender 3d or is it better to stay with blenders system. I would like
> to organize a school in Brazil where we will be teaching programing. I
> want to teach around creation of a software app on a large scale that
> is why I like blender 3D. Let me know all your thoughts.
>
> Chuck Smith
> _______________________________________________
> Beginners mailing list
> [hidden email]
> http://lists.squeakfoundation.org/mailman/listinfo/beginners
>

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Bert Freudenberg

Re: blender 3D

In reply to this post by kilon

On 14.12.2011, at 09:57, dimitris chloupis wrote:

Are you ready to code a 1 million lines of code application ? Because that is how big blender is. Sure maybe you can squeeze that because smalltalk is much less verbose than c to 250.000 lines. Are you still ready to do that ? And fight all the buginess along the way ?

Wouldn't you rather debug in Smalltalk than any other system? It's not as if any other language would make that simpler.

Also if your goal is to teach programming then you will probably need to choose a more popular programming language as that will be the choice that your students will favor.

It's true that people favor popular languages. That's what the term "popular" means. It's also true, however, that people with Smalltalk experience usually have a much better grip on OO design than those who only know the more popular languages.

[...]
In the end its completely up to what you want to do, in any case one thing I advice is never , never , never understimate how difficult simple things can be ;)

Never underestimate the power of a dedicated professor and a bunch of good PhD students. They can create amazing things, certainly enough to learn with.

That's how I got hooked into Smalltalk back in my university days. We built a largish 3D rendering system, in VisualWorks Smalltalk. You may have encountered this picture, which I created in that system:

So yes, it's perfectly possible. You have to have at least one technically very proficient member in your group though. He/she will have to initially mentor all the others who are new to this. Over time the number of capable people will grow.

Good luck!

- Bert -

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askoh

Re: blender 3D

Administrator

Interesting. Is the 3D rendering work in VisualWorks available for use now?

Thanks,
Aik-Siong Koh

cbc

Re: blender 3D

In reply to this post by chsmith

On Tue, Dec 13, 2011 at 7:00 AM, <[hidden email]> wrote:
> Hi great squeakers, is it possible to create in squeak an app like Blender
> 3d or is it better to stay with blenders system. I would like to organize a
> school in Brazil where we will be teaching programing. I want to teach
> around creation of a software app on a large scale that is why I like
> blender 3D. Let me know all your thoughts.
>
> Chuck Smith

Depending where you want to go with this, you can also dig deeper into
the underpinnings. There is previous work on doing raytracing
directly in smalltalk:
Squeak Port: http://map.squeak.org/package/3993429e-7493-42a3-ab07-40b57d677117
Original VW announcement:
http://www.cincomsmalltalk.com/userblogs/buck/blogView?showComments=true&entry=3243310836

No idea what the license is, but it does show that you can do what you
want in Smalltalk/Squeak. It just takes time and effort (a lot of it
to rival Blender3d).

-Chris
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kilon

Re: blender 3D

In reply to this post by Bert Freudenberg

>> Wouldn't you rather debug in Smalltalk than any other system? It's not as if any other language would make that >> simpler.

That was not my point. My point was crystal clear, that making an application of the magnitude of blender is no small feat. Unlike other open source software , Blender is taken very seriously by professionals because it has not only a team of 40 developers ( more or less) but many of those people working on Blender are neither new to 3d nor mere students with just a few month in their back. They are people that know what they are doing and how they will do it. Further a huge difference is that blender did not start as open source it started as a commercial product that later , much , much later became open source. So its not just another open source product that some random guy started it , with just a group of enthusiastic people who were just introduced to the concept of 3d. It was made by a company with years of experience in professional 3d .

The debugger won't give you the experience needed to build something like blender. You can certainly build a 3d with a sizable group of students. Even in that case it will take years. It took blender 12 years to reach the status it is now.

About debugger, I clear stated my preference on smalltalk IDE and its live environment nothing more to add. Lisp also seems to follow the same guidelines with flexible debugger and live coding abilities.

>> It's true that people favor popular languages. That's what the term "popular" means. It's also true, however, that >> people with Smalltalk experience usually have a much better grip on OO design than those who only know the >> more popular languages.

I thought his goal was to produce pro coders that will throw to the market. So It was my belief that he should invest in languages with job prospects. But it seems this is not the goal and he aims for something more freestyle in terms of teaching , so smalltalk will be perfect for his needs.

My issue with smalltalk is severe lack of documentation , buggy libraries (had several issues with morphic crashing squeak) and generally a very small community .

Other than that, I find Squeak amazing product and that is why I consider it , together with lisp for a major project I am planning. If I believe squeak did suck, I would not be here in the first place. And I don't believe that is the fault of the community that the above weaknesses exist. More or less all programming languages that are not that popular have them.

I just love the graphical nature of st , the live coding, the DSL abilities, the community of polite people (contrary to lisp community which I had to face arrogance more than I expected) and general a product that is both mature and way ahead its time. I even consider making my project in both lisp and squeak / pharo ( though a smalltalk only version is not excluded either as I have my reservation about usefulness and necessity of lisp ) as I would love to gives this way my support to the community and make this product a little more popular and taken more seriously.

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