Hi,

I wanted to ask about any resources for advanced usages of GEM (and, for that matter, any general suggestions about teaching graphics programming).

I'm looking ahead to a course in interactive multimedia. I have a lot of experience with audio programming and some familiarity with interaction (though not with motion tracking, except the most basic level of [pix_diff], [pix_blob]). Graphics is supposed to be part of this curriculum, but here's where I'm lacking experience.

I'm familiar with the basic shapes in GEM, and moving them around using [translate] / [rotate], and with texture mapping onto the basic shapes, and iteration for multiple copies of basic shapes (but getting the transformations right is really hard!). I'm not familiar with meshes and modeling.

The plus side is that the students are not likely to take rapidly to the material, so their final projects will probably not be so complex. But it would be nice to show the possibilities beyond spinning a photo around a sphere.

I've got the Packt e-book "Multimedia Programming with Pure Data" -- it does a good job of explaining basic usage but doesn't go to the next level of artistic usage.

So I'm looking for something that touches on this next level (similar to the way a beginning Pd user might not be clear how to move beyond oscillator --> filter --> amplifier --> DAC into making music).

Thanks,
hjh

I think this is one of the best things made with Gem and with a good documentation, it helps perhaps: https://chdh.net/egregore_source_manual.htm
You could also have a look into open GL and shaders, you can use them in Gem too.

@Jona Thanks - that's a great project! Will take some time to make sense of it (esp. [gemvertexbuffer]).

One takeaway, then, is that "real" projects don't use the basic shapes too much. The real power is in opengl or glsl hooks.

hjh