Ayam Icon
Ayam

Start
News
Gallery
Features
Download
Community
Docs

News

22. May 2013

Ayam now supports unclamping of curves and surfaces as well as extending curves to a specified point in space (adding one control point and maintaining the current shape of the curve), see this example:

Original Curve (u) and Original Curve with Extended Curve Superimposed (l)

See Changes.txt for a complete list of changes.

12. Apr 2013

Recent advances of Ayam in the CVS-Head are:
  • There is a new view action that zooms out to the whole scene, bound to the <Backspace> key.
  • Zoom to object and Zoom to all now adjust the clipping planes and lighting parameters to facilitate working with very large (coordinate values in the range of 10.000) or very tiny (coordinate values in the range of 0.00001) objects.
  • With the help of a new winding detection algorithm for 3D curves extracted from surfaces, the Bevel creation is now invariant wrt. surface winding/orientation. This means that the default bevel parameters always lead to the same bevel shape, resulting in consistent behaviour and less tweaking.
See Changes.txt for a complete list of changes.

The Ayam SourceForge project has been converted to the new SourceForge platform.

12. Mar 2013

X3D wire export has been extended to cover PolyMesh objects:

X3D Export of a PolyMesh with Wires  

In addition, X3D export gained a special export mode for x3dom, that embeds the scene to be exported into an existing XHTML template file.

25. Feb 2013

The Ayam team is currently evaluating the application of x3dom to improve the Ayam documentation and this news section with interactive 3D-views. Those 3D-views will replace existing 2D imagery that, naturally, always has a hard time to convey all the information as the author intended. The replacement will take place upon user request (as x3dom itself and the 3D assets are a bit heavy in comparison to the simple GIF/PNG data they replace). Possibly, pure 3D-versions of the documents will also be provided, or a global switch to enable all 3D-views at once; this is still undecided.
In the course of the evaluation of x3dom, the X3D export of Ayam was improved and a special mode for the export of NURBS surfaces was implemented. This mode allows to present models in the same way as in the Ayam view windows Shade-and-Draw display mode, i.e. a combined shaded and wireframe display of the surface, where the wires represent distinct knot values of the underlying NURBS representation.
Ongoing work in this area is to extend the wire-mode to PolyMesh objects and to optimize the size of the exported X3D files.

If you have a WebGL enabled browser you can try one of our first results now, by clicking on the "Toggle3D!"-button below. Note that, unfortunately, the line primitives for the aforementioned wireframe display are currently not supported by the x3dom SWF-fallback (this affects e.g. all IE users).

X3dom Example  

Here is some help on the keyboard commands and mouse bindings in x3dom.

If it did not work at all (this is not unexpected), maybe a visit to the x3dom browser check brings some enlightenment.

21. Dec 2012

New in the CVS head are C1 fillets for concatenated curves, see the following screenshot for an example and comparison with the old G1 fillets (blue curve) which continue to be available of course:

As you can see in the lower right corner, the shading for the C1 fillets changes more smoothly to the corner (i.e. it is hard to say where the fillet actually begins), however, the corner itself has a somewhat higher curvature. As the shape of the fillet is completely controlled by the C1 condition, smoother corners could only be achieved by moving the respective end points of the concatenated curves further apart.

31. Oct 2012

Welcome back 3D-bevels:

1. Oct 2012

Some property GUI user interface elements have been redesigned (default menu buttons and parameter value changing buttons no longer use text labels, menu entries layout improved on Aqua):

30. Sep 2012

Introducing object search that allows to search for objects given criteria, like e.g. names, types, materials, property values, master-instance relationships, or return values of arbitrary commands/procedures. The found objects can just be highlighted in the object tree, or arbitrary commands can be executed on them:

28. Jun 2012

The list of frequently asked questions (FAQ) has been updated.

Recent advances in the CVS-Head:

  • There are now two new cap creation modes, simple and simple integrated. Both work with non-planar curves, but can not cope with concave input. The integrated variant is combined into the capped surface via the concat surface mechanism.
  • Also bevels can now be integrated into the respective parameter surfaces.
  • As many tool objects now get the capabilities for bevel/cap creation on all four sides, the increased number of options to control bevels and caps are placed in new property GUI sections.
  • For easier management of properties, there is now a dialog that helps in creation/removal of NP/RP tags.

24. Apr 2012

Recent advances in the CVS-Head:
There is now a plugin that supports scripting in the Lua scripting language.
Similar to the JavaScript plugin jsinterp, the new luainterp plugin defines a Tcl command to run Lua code (luaEval), wraps the Ayam scripting interface commands as functions (e.g. crtOb()) and additionally defines the functions tclvar(), tclset(), and tcleval(). Lua code can, of course, also be run in Ayam Script objects:

10. Apr 2012

The Ayam 1.20 Linux release archives and setup executables have been updated with a statically linked ayslx plugin (compiled with Aqsis 1.8.1).

31. Mar 2012

Here is what is planned for the next release of Ayam (1.21):
  • improvement of section placement in Sweep, Birail1, Birail2, and Clone objects for trajectory curves with multiple knots/control points (preserving sharp corners and linear sections),
  • faster NURBS display while modelling or view actions are active through employment of display lists,
  • support for degenerate surfaces for OffsetNP,
  • selection mechanism for faces and lines to improve Subdivision-NURBS modelling,
  • custom bevels for all tool objects (not just for the Bevel object),
  • improved draw/shade quality of quadrics,
  • Lua scripting language integration

28. Mar 2012

Ayam 1.20 has been released. Get the new version from the download page, see also the complete list of changes.

21. Mar 2012

Ayam 1.20 preliminary installer executables for the Linux and Win32 platforms are now available for pre-release testing purposes on request.

19. Mar 2012

A feature freeze for the next official release, Ayam 1.20, scheduled for mid to end april is in effect as of today. The version of the CVS-Head has been bumped accordingly and interested parties may download and test Ayam to find bugs before release.

2. Mar 2012

Fillets and custom knots are now available to ConcatNP in the CVS-Head. A simple experiment with two quadrics, a half torus and a cylinder, leads to this piping, the smooth transition is created automatically:

22. Jan 2012

Recent advances in the CVS-Head:
  • The ConcatNP object can now be configured to split selected parameter patches in V direction and also to revert the patches before concatenation:


    Consequently, it is now much easier to use other tool objects as parameter objects.

  • Also curve objects can now be mixed in the ConcatNP parameter objects freely:


    Fillets and discontinuous transitions may be constructed this way.

  • Much work is also currently put in the documentation: more figures, less historic information directly in the text, improved layout of tables etc. lead to better readability.

22. Dec 2011

News from the CVS-Head:
To comfortably manipulate the multiplicity of NURBS curve control points there are now two modelling actions that increase/decrease the multiplicity of all tagged/selected points:

11. Jun 2011

News from the CVS-Head:
A new object type IPatch for direct work with interpolating surfaces is now available:

16. May 2011

The first hotfix for Ayam 1.19 is now available for download, it fixes some problems with dynamic property GUIs (e.g. shaders).

16. Mar 2011

New release Ayam 1.19 is now available for download, see also the complete list of changes.

15. Mar 2011

The ohloh badge on the Ayam home page now displays more correct data as MF3D, libsub, BWidgets and tkwidget code was excluded from the analysis, leading to massive drop in the LOC count.

The Ayam 1.19 release is imminent. As this release will contain a major change in the way rational coordinates are represented internally (from homogeneous to euclidean), developers should immediately download and test the CVS-Head.

8. Mar 2011

News from the CVS-Head:
The ExtrNC tool object now creates normals and stores them in a PV tag that the new 3DPVN mode of the OffsetNC tool object can use, in other words, there are now true 3D offset curves from extracted curves:

20. Feb 2011

News from the CVS-Head:
  • There is a new plugin named subdiv, that, with the help of the "Subdivide2.0" library by Biermann et.al., provides subdivision capabilities (Catmull-Clark and Loop) for the SDMesh object. Creases are currently not supported, but the original library has code for them.
  • Offset surfaces now support closed/periodic surfaces in any possible combination of open/closed/periodic for the U and V dimensions. Support for degenerate surfaces (e.g. surfaces with poles) is in the works.

3. Feb 2011

The first hotfix for Ayam 1.18.2 is now available for download, it fixes a nasty problem with the Add Bevel command entries.

23. Nov 2010

Christmas release Ayam 1.18.2 is now available for download, see also the complete list of changes.

15. Nov 2010

Bugfix release Ayam 1.18.1 is now available for download, see also the complete list of changes.

11. Nov 2010

The official documentation is now available in a new and improved version.

28. Oct 2010

Ayam 1.18 has been released. Get the new version from the download page, see also the complete list of changes.

19. Oct 2010

Working JavaScript support allowed to rewrite the Polyhedron generation code from George Hart so that it generates PolyMesh objects instead of VRML, so here is jtD in Ayam:

14. Oct 2010

Script objects now support arbitrary (plugin provided) scripting languages, so now you can do things like this:

23. Sep 2010

News from the CVS-Head:
  • Many solid and tool objects now support read-only points; their positions may be inquired for different modelling purposes, they can even be selected, but they may not be modified, they are drawn in blue (while editable points are white):

  • Towards support for multiple scripting languages: there is now a JavaScript plugin for Ayam (based on Mozilla SpiderMonkey) with a first bridge for the crtOb command. A property data bridge and multiple language support for the Ayam Script object are in the works. Also planned is support for Lua.
  • Much work has been put into the source code documentation, which is now almost complete for the Ayam core interfaces and data structures. The plugins need more work. The results created by Doxygen will be published soon on the web.

2. May 2010

The official documentation has been improved a bit and put online in a new version.

20. Apr 2010

Ayam 1.17 has been released. Get the new version from the download page, see also the complete list of changes.

24. Feb 2010

Recent advances in the CVS-Head now allow multiple SDNPatch objects to be merged into one. See the following image, two open NURBS patches were converted to SDNPatches, those SDNPatches merged into one, and then the FaceConnect operation was used to join the distinct sub-surfaces:

25. Jan 2010

The CVS-Head now contains initial support for offset surfaces:

With the help of two boundary curve extracting ExtrNC objects, a skin can be created easily, that closes the gap between both surfaces nicely:

There you are, patches with a thickness.

Archive

Read the old news from:

top of page


Randolf Schultz, 14. Mar 2012
randolf.schultz@gmail.com