Kickstarter

MeshUp progresses forward! See the below graph and change log for details.

Let me take a moment to thank all our supporters for your patience and support. Yes, it is taking us longer to release the beta than anticipated, but as you can see by the graph and videos, we are not that far. Please be patent with us as our small team is highly focused (in fact some of us need to step outside to confirm that indeed there is a sky) on imbuing MeshUp with a solid foundation of advanced functionality and an elegant simple UI.

At this time there are no major roadblocks or bugs to overcome. Our remaining development and focus for the beta release is now largely around completing cross platform support (if possible we would like to release the beta across all 3 platforms) and building out the first pass of our intuitive and painless interface for novice and advanced users alike.

Stay tuned for more videos and updates!

CHANGE LOG

May 21, 2013

• Basic mesh repair interface w/ highlighting of all errors added

• Major refactoring of all core developmental UI code towards a clean abstraction layer

• Proper name dynamic space handling added

• New back end UI command entries added (mostly for mesh repair)

• Major progress on UI event handling

• Join operator and functionality added to system

• Boolean operator elements added

• Progress on history tracking and undo/redo

• Progress made on local reconstruction for mesh merging

• QA has started and a series of bug fixes are in progress

Shelling*

Check out the Shelling feature in this video. More dramatic shelling examples to follow soon.

Mesh Repair*

Watch 2 basic examples showing automatic Mesh Repair. The user options associated with this command are in process and will be demoed in a future video.

*Thanks to Joo for the Totoro model and Ultimaker for the use of their mascot robot.

(Almost) midnight sun

The view from my office, 2:30am in Norway - Cherie

Development Update

Check out the latest MeshUp development updates on the graph below - we are getting closer to the beta!

CHANGE LOG

May 2, 2013

• Mesh repair for self intersections and stitching of holes 
• Kernel no longer provides any normals for UI (face or vertex) - face normals calculated on the interface side
• Completed mesh repair for degenerates and flips faces 
• Mesh to volume mesh using shell method 
• Bug fix - modifying position moves model but not gimbal
• Completed interface to kernel communication for file import and loading - current support for STL binary, STL ascii, OBJ, and VOL (vol files are converted to mesh volumes on loading)
• Correct in-scene bounding box for objects
• Add quality output and calculation options on save
• Maintain gimball scale to screen resolution
• Bug fix - multi-threading control
• All manifold objects are now converted on the fly to volume meshes
• Mesh to volume mesh using envelope method (in addition to volume)
• Locking of UI elements from user selection - e.g. users can no longer scale the viewport camera
• Default UI rendering set to flat shading
• Basic error reporting in place - more robust system needed
• Basic UI dialogue/command framework in place
• Command data structure/constructor completed
• Default UI theme created (alternative dark theme and others coming)

We are also posting these graphs and changes logs on Uformia's MeshUp page:

http://uformia.com/products/meshup/meshup-status

Mesh Repair with no repair

The video demonstrates how you can use Envelope to take a broken mesh, with no thickness and very quickly apply thickness and simultaneously repair the mesh.  Also there is a first peak at the graphic menu system and gimbal (our gumball).

This video is also available on Vimeo:

https://vimeo.com/65316522

Development Update

As a way to keep you better posted on our progress and track how close we are to releasing the early beta, we will start sharing updated versions of the graph below, taken directly from our roadmap and feature tracking. This will be a quick and easy way to post frequent updates and keep you in the loop.

* When the salmon bar of all items reaches 100%, MeshUp is ready for the early beta release.
* When the blue bar of all items reaches 100%, MeshUp 1.0 RC is ready for the full public release.

CHANGE LOG

April 17, 2013:

• Major bug fixed - 10% of systems no longer hard crashing

• Gimbal (transformation manipulator) has fully functionality with rotation, translation and scale (bug still to fix)

• New layer added for UI to kernel communication

• Minor bug fix - error with flipped faces in meshes

• Basic popup/command UI framework added

• Highlighting of errors in imported meshes

• Envelope style importing of meshes (creates watertight object)

• Import and use of VOL files as a mesh primitive

Look for more videos and photos in the next few days!

Tshirts

Looking for a snazzy new tshirt? Well look no further. Both the MeshUp and Saving the World from Polygons tshirts are now available for order on our website:

http://www.uformia.com/products/merchandise

Development Update and Beta Delay

We hit a difficult bug since our last update, which has unfortunately set back development. Hard crashes were occurring on about 10% of our testbed of computers. At least one part of this core system bug has been identified: we had a serious fault in part of our system handling SSE2 on certain machines. This part of the solution is now being patched, and we continue to sleuth out the remaining issue which is causing models with many elements to fall into endless computation.

Speed is the other area which still requires more effort. As we mentioned in our Risks and Challenges section, our technology is computationally intensive. There are planned improvements we can make to speed, and these are in motion, but with the bug mentioned above, our team refocused on solving this fatal issue. Once that fix is complete, we can turn our attention to speed and user interface.

This delay is not ideal - we appreciate your patience.  We are working to get you the beta as soon as we can!

Having said that, earlier in the month we had some good progress on MeshUp's UI. We are also happy to let you know that development is proceeding on all platforms and we will closely synchronize the release of MeshUp across the platforms with a simple unified interface and behavior.

UI

We would like to share some example images of MeshUp's UI. MeshUp has an integrated gumball for easy translation, rotation and scaling of objects. We have also developed a simple contextual user interface that we hope even novice users will enjoy. The design is meant to keep the user engaged in the 3D space and not drop down menus. Of course we will also add the ubiquitous "File" menu for those who want the drop downs. One last feature we have been toying with is a on-demand interactive "command line" for advanced users. Let us know if you think this is something you would like to see in MeshUp (you can see the early version of it in the image where "union" of the meshes is about to happen).

Highlighting of mesh errors with heads-up contextual user interface:

Gumball in action:

On-demand interactive "command line":

Get Your Own Tbunny

You can now order your own tbunny from our shops on Sculpteo and Shapeways:

The ceramic coffee cup showcased in our campaign media is available as well for purchase. If you want a personalized cup with a different scanned face(s), contact us and send us your scan. The selection of Uformia models will grow over time.

Unifying Meshes

Finally, here is another nice example from one of our designers showing how you can make really quick custom variations of a model with MeshUp. The ring on the left is made of 74 separate & intersecting meshes. On the right are new variations on this same ring made in seconds by simply changing a few values. Each variation is a single watertight mesh, ready to be send to any 3D printer. MeshUp builds a non-destructive, constructive relationship out of the 74 meshes which remain as separate parametrized elements. The relationship and orientation between the parts can be freely changed at any moment.

Beta Release
As posted in our last update, mesh repair has required a significant amount of resources and time - but we think you will be pleased with the results. The question is, when can our Kickstarter supporters start playing with MeshUp? Our current objective is to get you an early beta by the last days of March, but we are pushing the clock and ourselves to meet this goal. We will update everyone again on the timeframe later this month. This puts us a bit behind our intended schedule, but it is important to us that we release a product that really works for our users. Of course in the software world, testing a product early and often with real users is key to its success - which is why we are excited to get this in your hands ASAP.

Also in the works is a support infrastructure and tools for the MeshUp community. We will be revealing a few surprises related to this in coming weeks.

Open Source!
We would like to start with one of those surprise announcements today, by happily revealing that along with the beta we will be directly releasing part of the MeshUp interface as open source code! This will be a small release of code but an important milestone for Uformia as we are founded on the principles of sharing. You can read more about our business ethos here:

http://uformia.com/be-free

The open interface code (and future open code releases) will be licensed under the Common Good Public License (CGPL), which was developed by some of our own team members to help establish basic guidelines for ethical and societal issues stemming from powerful and distributed "physical" technologies such as 3D printing (as illustrated by the recent announcement of a 3D printed plastic "gun").

CGPL is a natural expansion on the fair play principles of Free and Open Source as intangible information increasingly merges into tangible reality or as we say around here - "code is reality". The hope is to foster the rational self-development of common agreements and communities that are connected to such technologies. You can read more about CGPL at:

http://cgpl.org

We are truly looking forward to getting the code into the hands of open communities and see what develops.

Tshirts and Tbunnys
Everyone should have received their tshirts by now. If not, send us a message.

As promised earlier, we will be selling the tshirts and tbunny from Uformia's website - this has just taken a little longer than anticipated to iron out the logistics.

More Than Mesh Repair
We finally had a moment to put together a short video that not only demonstrates hole repair using MeshUp, but also its non-destructive modeling power. Watch the video to see how easy it is to seamlessly combine models. While this video is only showing the workflow and results, the actual modeling only took about 10 min. and once defined can easily be changed in minutes - e.g. mesh data can be swapped out, the amount of blending between the models can be controlled, models can be scaled, moved and rotated but maintain the relations set, etc.