Roadmap

ori-pop began as a minimal creative-coding workspace. The longer ambition is a GPU-first generative design framework that serves both art-making and real fabrication — producing robotic toolpaths, 3D-printed forms, and CNC programs from the same generative models used to create visuals.

This page records the architectural direction being built toward, so that patterns established early stay consistent as the codebase grows.

Coordinate System — Z-Up Right-Handed ✓

The framework uses the CAD / robotics / 3D-printing standard: Z is up, XY is the build plane, right-handed orientation (ISO 80000-2, ROS, STEP, STL, Rhino, Grasshopper, FreeCAD, most fabrication toolchains).

X = right, Y = depth/forward, Z = up, XY = ground plane. The camera’s default up vector is Vec3::Z. All mesh primitives (sphere, cube, plane) are generated in this convention.

Live Inspector Panel ✓

A real-time egui inspector panel renders as a fourth GPU pass on top of every 3D frame. Press Tab to toggle it. Shows and edits camera, lighting, texture-generation parameters, and the current frame’s named scene objects.

Sketch-first evolution

The core stays a thin Processing-like toolkit. Richer mutators, editors, and distribution experiments land in sketches first; successful patterns are promoted into oripop-canvas (or future crates) with tests. See ROADMAP.md §0b for the full wording.

oripop-math — Geometry Without GPU

A new crate with no GPU dependency — no wgpu, no winit. It is the foundational layer that every other crate depends on for shared geometric types: Frame (coordinate frames for robot poses and workpiece datums), Mesh (CPU-side vertex and index data), Ray, BoundingBox, Plane, and the Sdf primitive tree described below.

Because it carries no GPU weight it can be tested headlessly on any machine, including CI, with ordinary Rust unit tests.

Signed Distance Fields

An SDF is a function that takes a point in space and returns a single number: how far that point is from the surface of a shape, with a sign that tells you whether you are inside or outside.

positive → outside the shape
zero     → exactly on the surface
negative → inside the shape

Boolean operations — union, subtraction, intersection — reduce to arithmetic on two distance values (min, max). No polygon clipping, no mesh repair, no degenerate triangles. The shape is described as a tree of primitives and combinators, evaluated per point.

Built-in primitives include Sphere, Box, Cylinder, Torus, and Gyroid — a triply periodic minimal surface that is the dominant infill structure in modern FDM and SLA printing, load-bearing in all directions.

Modifiers include Shell (hollow with a uniform wall thickness), Offset (expand or contract the surface — useful for fit tolerances), Twist, and Bend.

Surface-Aware Texture Generation

The current generative texture pipeline produces a flat 2D image that is applied to a mesh by UV coordinates. The next step is texture generation that is parameterized in the same (u, v) coordinate system as the surface itself.

A parametric surface is a function surface(u, v) → point in 3D. If the texture is generated as a function of the same (u, v) — sharing the surface’s own coordinate system — the alignment is mathematically guaranteed. The texture is not projected onto the surface from outside; it grows from the same parameterization that defines the geometry.

Three levels of alignment:

UV sampling (current). The compute shader generates a flat image without knowledge of the 3D shape. Distortion follows from the UV layout.

Surface-parameterized generation. The compute shader receives surface-specific data: profile curve, arc length reparameterization, principal curvatures. The pattern is generated as a function of surface parameters, not flat image space.

Simulation on the surface. Reaction-diffusion equations (Turing patterns, branching, cellular spots) run directly in UV space with diffusion that is isotropic in surface coordinates — the way biological surface patterns actually form.

For fabrication, the texture is not decoration. It encodes material or process information: a gradient that maps to multi-material print zones, a pattern that defines sparse versus dense infill tied to structural stress, a field that encodes CNC cut directions aligned to the dominant surface feature.

Physics Simulation

Two complementary backends:

Rigid body — Rapier (pure Rust, CPU) for collision detection, joints, and constraints. Results visualized via oripop-3d each frame.

Particles, soft body, cloth, fluid — Position-Based Dynamics on GPU compute. Each iteration is a compute dispatch; the output position buffer binds directly as a vertex buffer for rendering with no CPU readback.

Genetic and Evolutionary Optimization

The genome is a flat array of floats encoding SDF parameters, force field strengths, structural lattice parameters — any continuous design variable. The entire population is evaluated in a single GPU compute dispatch, one invocation per individual. The fitness function is a WGSL shader.

For fabrication objectives: minimize material volume, maximize stiffness-to-weight, enforce minimum wall thickness, penalize overhangs beyond the printable threshold — all evaluable per-voxel in the SDF volume.

Fabrication Output

• Watertight mesh extraction from SDF volumes via marching cubes on GPU.
• Overhang angle analysis — a printability heatmap computed from surface normals versus the Z-up build direction, visualized as a texture overlay.
• Layer slicing — plane-mesh intersection per layer.
• Export to STL, 3MF (preferred by Bambu, Prusa, Cura — supports materials, colors, and lattice metadata), and OBJ.
• G-code generation from slice data.

Crate Structure

oripop-math       no GPU — pure Rust geometry kernel
    ├── oripop-geo        computational geometry, some GPU compute
    │       ├── oripop-evo    genetic / evolutionary optimization
    │       └── oripop-fab    fabrication output
    ├── oripop-physics    simulation
    └── oripop-3d         rendering and visualization
            └── oripop-canvas   2D drawing API

oripop-3d depends on both oripop-canvas and oripop-math. oripop-canvas does not depend on oripop-math yet. Higher-level crates depend on oripop-math but not necessarily on each other.