Thursday, December 10, 2015

3D Graphics Made Easy

I'm a big fan of doing math using very visual tools and loved using Visual Python to do 3D graphics. I was sad to learn it doesn't work on the Raspberry Pi, and since the Pi is a slower processor than the average desktop or laptop, I must have had the impression that 3D graphics were too much for the Pi. Imagine my surprise when after some googling I found Pi3D. It's a free, open-source Python package which is easy to install on Linux, and by making use of Numpy and the Graphics Processing Unit (GPU), the graphics are surprisingly fast!

After getting a lot of help from the Pi3D Google group and one of the developers, Paddy Gaunt, Pi3D has become my favorite Graphics package to play around with. I've installed it on every new Pi image I've burned, on the Ubuntu machines I work with at the Coder School, on my laptop that runs Manjaro Linux and even old Red, my Windows laptop. So I definitely have a lot of experience installing it, making me the perfect person to make a tutorial video on Getting Started with Pi3D.

Paddy Gaunt had already posted a dozen or more cool videos demonstrating the graphics he created with Pi3D but this is the first tutorial explaining to beginners how to install Pi3D and write a simple program. Here it is:


Paddy was the first to comment on the video, and he added a link to it in the official documentation. There's my name!





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