Thomas Diewald (who is also the author of the excellent kinect library dLibs_freenect, and many Processing pieces) recently created another library for generating realtime fluid simulations in Processing, using either the CPU or the GPU: diewald_fluid. The results are quite amazing, and it is also very fast, specially when using the GPU.

GSVideo 0.9 is a significant release of this library because it introduces a new methodology to feed video frames directly into GLTexture objects from the GLGraphics library, which often results in a reduction of CPU usage of around 50%. The latest version of GLGraphics, 0.99, is required for this optimization to work.

This new release of GLGraphics comes hand in hand with GSVideo 0.9, also available today. These new versions of the two libraries introduce a combined mode of operation that greatly improves video playback performance, which I will describe in the next post. Now I will focus on the new features of GLGraphics concerning exclusively with rendering and shading.

One of my motivations to develop Software Libre is the possibility to share knowledge and to create potentially useful tools, not only for myself but also for other artists and coders. So, it is very encouraging to see work being done with some of the tools I have been putting together during the last couple of years. Check the rest of this post to see some great projects made with Processing, GLGraphics, GSVideo, and Proscene.

Processing 1.5 was announced a few days ago. This version brings many changes since the last stable release, including the new Android mode to create apps for smartphones and tablets running Google’s operating system. I updated the GLGraphics library to work with Processing 1.5, and so a new version of the library (0.95) is available for download.

A recent post in the Processing forum discussed the question of how to use GLGraphics to speed-up rendering of geometry created with the Toxiclibs libraries. Toxiclibs is an open-source collection of libraries for computational design, created by Karsten “toxi” Schmidt. It has been used to create really good work, check the community showreel for a compilation of projects made with it. So in this post I expand a little on this topic of integrating Toxiclibs and GLGraphics.

Suggestions from users of the GLGraphics library led to this new release, 0.9.9.1, which incorporates several enhancements and refinements. Grab zip package from here, and take a look at the detailed release notes here.