American Museum of Natural History
Hack the Deep
February 9th-11th, 2018
Virtual Fossil Fragmenter Team
Sean McGuffee, Sophia van Valkenburg, Teodora Szasz, and Luis Ibanez
- Clone this repo
- Run a local server using the root of this project
http-server
is an easy-to-use local server- Install using npm:
$ npm install -g http-server
- On the command line,
cd
to the root of this project. - Run using
$ http-server .
(optional argument-p <port>
is port number. default is 8080.)
- Open
localhost:8080
to view 3D model fragments - Make sure you have downloaded the .stl model files and placed them in a
models
directory in the project root
- The models may take a few seconds to load since they have high polygon count (very detailed)
Automate Save Image
will autogenerate 5 fragments and provide a download link for eachSave Image
is a download link for the currently displayed fragmentRefresh Current Model
button to change the rotation and fragmentation of the current model- A dropdown lists the models available for fragmentation
- Autogenerate more than 5 fragments. Possibly allow the user to specify how many fragments they want to generate, and specify for which models. Download zip file instead of individual images.
- Use a better fragmentation algorithm (currently it just uses clipping planes). Voronoi Shattering? Ideally it would fragment the fossils in a more "realistic" way, like breaking off at "weak" points.
- Ability to upload model (if we want them to be persistent across sessions, would need to use storage e.g. Amazon S3)
- Is a web application really the best format for the tool? Could a desktop application be better?
- Web application advantages: Easy to use by multiple people, cross-platform portability, easy to maintain, less complicated setup
- Desktop application advantages: More powerful & faster capabilities, don't have to deal with uploading or downloading models
- Look into VTK for solutions to this problem: https://www.vtk.org/modeling/