TSIPP Work Bench

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The TSIPP Work Bench is an interactive program for drawing in 3D. You can create still images and animations, and use these as "custom widgets" in a Tcl/Tk application. A paper was presented to the O'Reilly Open Source Convention in San Diago on 26th July 2001. View the slides, together with annotation, for a quick overview of what it's all about.

Visit the project area at http://sourceforge.net/projects/tsippwb and check out the documentation  online.

The latest release, 1.6a, offers the following enhancements over 1.4, the release made at the time of OSCON:

• The "MultiView" widget is now much closer to becoming a megawidget in its own right. Multiple instances may be created by the user within separate toplevels. A different source file may be loaded into each one and objects may be selected in one MultiView and copied to another. In combination with the "Zoom" feature this allows arbitrary scaling of objects.

 
• The use of a "tabbed notebook" style makes efficient use of screen area and provides support for low resolution monitors.

 
• Images of arbitrary size and aspect ratio may be now be created.

 
• An animation may be rendered as a set of ppm files for conversion to MPEG1 format using ppmtompeg. Here's an example of one together with the source, and the parameter file needed to perform the conversion with the command:

"ppmtompeg -realquiet nuke6.param".
 
• Support for Freehand components has been enabled, and this is now documented.

 
• More testing has been, as described under qualification and randomized testing. Note however, that there are known problems.
  
  
• The program is faster as several optimizations have been implemented. To determine where optimization would be best applied, a profiler was developed which supports [incr Tcl]. As this may be of more general application, a separate release of this utility has been made available - download version 1.1.

• An alternative mode will be supported in which OpenGL is used as the underlying graphics engine rather than TSIPP. This yields dramatic increases in rendering speed by utilizing hardware acceleration. I am using the package TkOGL by Claudio Esperança to access OpenGL from within Tcl. Experimentation has showed that the speedup comes at the expense of reduced realism - shadow generation and the rich textures of TSIPP have no parallel.

 
• A theater lighting program is planned as a separate thread of development, reusing technology from the TSIPPwb.

Last updated: 10th July 2002