Work Log

March 21
11:10AM-11:30AM
2PM-3PM
John and Kris dicussed our options for which project we wanted to take on and we decided to do the modeller. We did some research on the different techniques, most of our research at that time was done on surfaces of revolution. We wrote our project proposal and turned it in.

April 18
9PM-11:45PM
We met in Science 144 and were moresuccesful at finding sources for the different types of modelling. Also we lookedat starting our web page. We were not very successful and did not get any where withit. We began to think of how to write a program that creates a object usessurfaces of revolutions. Kris came up with making a struct that holds values for thepoints in multiple arrays then we will take points from an input file, then rotatethose points around the y-axis by 10° then storing those points in an array. Once allpoints are computed then the points that have the same y-value will be connected bya gl call to GL_LINES then we will connect the points that have the samecorresponding degree to give a wireframe view of the object. Kris started coding this, but got hung up when trying to figure out how to rotate the points around the y-axis.  John spent much of the time looking up information on the other techniques finding good resources for lofting, but having trouble with Extrusion.
April 20
10PM-12:15AM
We met again in 144. We found that the Wittenberg site had links to help with making a webpage. The most helpful was http://www.ncsa.uiuc.edu/General/Internet/WWW/HTMLPrimerPrintable.html.  From this site we found that you can click on View then Source to find how the webpage was set up. This was the most helpful hint. We researched extrusion trying to find out what exactly it was and we were unsuccessful.
April 21
11:20AM-12:20PM
We talked with Naeem about the different modelling techniques that we are trying to implement. This gave us a much better understanding of what we are going to try and program and how we are going implement the differenttechniques.
April 21
8:30PM-9:15PM
Kris added and made some minor changes to the webpage so that it would be ready for the ProjectUpdate.
April 23
9PM - 12AM
We met again, Kris continued in his attempts to get Surfaces of Revolution to work, while John continued to gather information for the website on exactly what the techniques were, and how they are used.  Kris' attempts at programming were met with a little more success however the models were still coming out in an odd fashion.  We attempted to debug this together, but grew frustrated and decided to pick it up later.
April 26
9PM - 1AM
John began work on a new webpage using Netscape Composer instead of Notepad and HTML code.  The website began to come together quickly, and pictures and information were added outside of our own.  As well as a few links to various related websites.
April 27
7PM - 1AM
We met up again, Kris had made some substantial progress on the coding and had gotten Surfaces of Revolution to work for most cases, as long as The first and last points were touching the Y-Axis.  We decided to move on to lofting, the next technique for which we had the most information.   We co-coded a quick lofting algorithm together that was able to do lofting in a fairly simple form for a few cases.  Kris said that he had some ideas on how to make the code better and would work on it at home while I continued to update our webpage.
April 29
7PM - 10PM
Kris had successfully fixed and upgraded our lofting algorithm with some minor enhancements that simply made it look better, he proceeded to begin looking up information on Excursion, which at this time, we still had very minimal information on.   John worked on coming up with images using the code for Lofting and Surfaces of Revolution, and then took screenshots of these images and moved them to the webpage, adding information on their use and the input files that were used to create these objects.  Again, we were unsuccessful at finding any useful information on Excursion.  
April 30
12PM-5PM
We spent a lot of time trying to come up with some good/solid information on Excursion, again having problems finding information on anything outside of the manufacturing process.  As we were about to quit, John found some information on a technique called Sweeping.   This technique was compared to Excursion, so we attempted a search on Sweeping, this yielded a very helpful link that talked about both Excursion and Sweeping and compared the two.  A link to this page was added to our website and we decided to continue more the next day.
May 1
12PM-5PM
9PM-12AM
John gathered more pictures and information on Extrusion as Kris began to code a very simple example of extrusion.   Within a short amount of time Kris had a sample program for extrusion running, that was outputting the points given, however it was outputting them wrong (connecting the points wrong).  John was able to find the problem and we were able to correct the error and got our extrusion part of the program up and running.  Again, we ran the program and gathered some images from it which John moved to the new webpage.
May 2
3PM - 11PM
We added some final touches to the program, including a more user friendly interface that is brough up using the B key.  We created a few more images for each technique to make sure it was working as we believed, and included some of these images on the webpage.  Kris then debugged the program a little more, removing some unneeded code and code segments, while John went about creating the power-point presentation for the Project Presentation the next day.  Kris made some screenshots of the new images to use in the presentation and more data was gathered by John to use during our presentation.  
May 3
12:30 - 1:30
Kris worked on the Readme.txt for the project while John put some finishing touches on the website and typed up the Work Log into a new webpage that could be linked from our original webpage.