FlatFab News

August 1, 2015

• JanusVR and FlatFab at Maker Festival 2015! A couple quick pictures from the event:
  
  

June 19, 2015:

• Release 0.8.0: "teeth"/finger joints for surface facet generation, ability to export slab OBJs of geometry in packed 2D configuration, video example!
• To create a design where pieces are connected with "teeth":

  File -> Open Surface Template (choose a low-poly OBJ file)

  then, on the side pane

  Generate -> Surface Facets (check the checkbox which says "Teeth"). You can also dynamically adjust the number of teeth by playing with the material thickness, which is on the side pane Guides -> Dimensions.

  

• The second feature is the ability to export the 2D layouts as an OBJ where the parts have thickness ("slabs"). To save a "flattened" OBJ, do:

  File -> Save Flattened Slab Geometry.

  This can be used for example, in an animation which uses blendshapes, like in this video (also check out a custom logo for maker festival!):

  Link to YouTube Video

  (Animation/environment created with JanusVR - http://janusvr.com /r/janusVR)

April 14, 2015:

• Release 0.7.1 is a Mac OSX mouse cursor bugfix for users with a retina display.

January 1, 2015:

• Happy New Year! FlatFab 0.7 beta has been released, which offers better support for holes and an improved triangulation algorithm!

December 8, 2014:

• FlatFab featured in a 3ders.org article!

November 18, 2014:

• Release 0.6!

  We think you will agree, the 0.6 release is a huge update, and it is one that contains all of our last month's work. With so many interface changes, this release of FlatFab feels like a new piece of software. If you are not already using FlatFab 0.6, download it now!

  The most notable changes are:

  • Complete redesign of the left panel interface (now organized into "Edit", "Generate", "Guides", "Physics" and "View" submenus)
  • New instruction overlays to make things easier, and an initial "getting started" dialog provides the basic info to get started quickly
  • The setup of procedural modelling operations redesigned to be much more intuitive, and on-screen instructions explain step-by-step what to do
  • "Set Radial" tool completely redesigned, allowing for greater creative freedom and is now much easier to use
  • New "transform" tool creates an easy-to-use widget allowing translation, rotation and scaling of a section
  • New "pen mode" allows creation of planar sections working directly with control points
  • New toolbar at top-right provides easy access to "local symmetry" and "pen mode"
  • When "local symmetry" is enabled, while creating the section the symmetry is shown immediately, and a blue symmetry axis is also shown
  • Improvements to the sketched curve fitting - shapes with sharp corners are much easier to sketch
  • Bugfixes to the "Grid" procedural modelling operation

October 25-26, 2014:

• Demoed flatfab at SmartWeek 2014, here in Toronto

October 23, 2014:

• Flatfab had a demo booth over the weekend at the 2014 Small Business Forum, here in Toronto

October 15, 2014:

• The research work that flatfab is based upon - "FlatFitFab: Interactive Modeling with Planar Sections" - was presented at ACM UIST 2014 and won the award for "best presentation" by people's choice!

  http://youtu.be/qJ9AYGN4Mes

September 30, 2014:

• Release 0.5 Beta! (Major improvements to the UI: a new tool sidebar, transform widget, help dialog, and example FlatFab models are now included!)
• Note that as of 0.5 the keys to add/remove control points have changed, they are now + and - (next to the backspace key), we will add a note about this to the "getting started" dialog in the next version. (Thanks /u/TedBeer!)

July 31, 2014:

• Release 0.4 Beta! (export calibration shapes, smoother rendering and animations, multisampling can be set as a command line parameter with -ms flag, Linux version updated to include RPATH within the binary removing the need for a launch script)

July 24, 2014:

• Release 0.3 Beta (added antialiasing, Mac OSX build released!)

June 17, 2014:

• Release 0.2 Beta ("smoother" curve filtering, new default rotation of 80 degrees)

June 16, 2014:

• Release 0.1 Beta (image loading bugfix!)

June 15, 2014:

• Release 0.1 Beta (the first official release!)