Tuesday, June 25, 2013

Expanded The Catalog To Include Charged Planes

The electric field from the positively charged plane converges towards a negative charge.

The growth of the efield toolkit and associated visualization catalog continues. I have added the ability to represent charged planes and also the ability to automatically generate field lines. The visualization catalog now includes several examples of charged planes, parallel charged planes, and point charges and planes.

Of course both the toolkit and the catalog are released under the popular open source Apache License (V2).

Clearly the choice of positions for the field lines needs some work. It is not particularly bad, but the hand positioned lines from the earlier examples present superior illustrations of the physics. The old method will continue to work, but at least for the case of the charged plane the automatic generation of the field lines is excellent.

It is also clear that some time should soon go into optimizing the representation and drawing of the field lines. Each line is currently represented as one vertex array, and drawn with one drawArrays call. It seems I should be able to batch these and generate several field lines with one drawArrays call.