April 29, 2008

symmetry

symmetric



pseudo symmetry

April 15, 2008

Trochoid Apps for download

I've made 3 trochoid based apps, they are: Trochoid, TroTorted and circa. These are mac apps and should run on intel or powerpc. Should run on 10.5, I'm running 10.4 and they may run as far back as OS9 with InterfaceLib and CarbonLib installed!

These are the apps I use to create all the spirography images here. The apps are freeware. Trochoid was initially shareware and water marks movies and restricts rendered image sizes until registered. To unlock that goto Trochoid Preferences...->Enter Registration->put "wuve-khmn-ooru" into the code field and press enter.

Documentation is lacking for all the apps. Lacking as in there is none. Years ago I made some unfinished documentation that I'll try to find and repost. For now my intentions for more and complete documentation is to make videos. The video below is my first. It doesn't explain much but shows the general path from start to finish of making a trochoid movie.


Download TrochoidApps.zip 6MB


what you get...
The downloaded file 'TrochoidApps.zip' expands to the folder 'Trochoid Apps (raw)'. (raw means there are no sample files :( yet) Inside you'll find Trochoid, circa and a folder for TroTorted.


TroTorted is in it's own folder because it needs to be next to the Quesa file. Quesa is a 3D engine. If TroTorted can't find Quesa it'll crash while trying to start. (circa uses Quesa too, but I was able to package it inside the app)


Trochoid
Build, animate, texture and render. The most complex of the 3. The interface is non-standard and I don't know how intuitive it is. Most in need of documentation/how-to's.

circa
Build curves. The main feature of this app is that the curve is 'live'. You can adjust the rotation speed while it's in motion. In Trochoid you can't change the parameters while the animation preview is running. This app has no color and texturing is very limited. It was designed primarily to explore curve motion.

TroTorted
2D trochoid curves are wiggled in the third dimension by a sine wave. 3D mesh models can be output as DXF or for POV-RAY.

Again, I need documentation and sample files. That will be my next post. Enjoy :)

April 10, 2008

Trochoidal Videos

This first video shows the process of making a rendered movie. About 40 minutes of computer time is compressed to 2 minutes.


These next 3 videos repeat the same animation 4 times to simulate some looping.







The last video is available in this MUCH higher quality file: springs3z.mov.
640x480, 29.97fps, ~12 seconds, looping, quicktime, 8.7mb