puff-0.0 by Trenton Henry

puff is my "puff ball modeler" which I used to design models and sets for my Wibble books. I has front/back/left/right/top/bottom/perspective views, cut/copy/paste, wire/solid/shaded, and export to POV Ray. Its "puff balls" because everything in the Wibbleverse is made of spheres. Except the ground plane, and the water plane in TSY.

puff worked in conjunction with a command line tool called sph, which generated many of the Wibbly shapes and models used in the books. Some of the scenes in 3LW have more than 250,000 spheres in them. In retrospect I admit that was overkill, but I wanted to push the limits to see what I could do.

I wrote this way back in the early 2000's on a PPC Mac, and later, in 2017 I resurrected it, ported it to Intel, and tweaked it into a workable state. It's all written in Objective-C because there was a time when I thought that might be an interesting thing. I've since recanted, but I have not re-written all of my Obj-C code in plain old C.

I recently rebuilt it on 64bit MacOSX but on an M1 at least the colors are wiggidy wack and its hard to tell what's going on. So I need to debug it.

Devlog

01/20/22

I didn't keep a dev log while I worked on this. So, short of me going back through hg commits to find dates and tags (which I'm not terribly keen to do), this is all there is.

Ok, well, I don't have any pictures on this computer, so I will have to find some.

For images of the output, see my books. For some images of the interface, see below. Click an image to view details. (Ok, I cannot find those images yet... still looking...)