epistomoes

caps

sometimes I find my screen so pretty I take a picture...


The desktop image is raytraced mirrors. shiny!

Trotorted UVs

While working on my maze programming homework... one thing led to another and I figured out how to specify UV coordinates properly (UVs map a 2D image to a 3D mesh). I dug into the TroTorted code and added this which was wonderfully easy (I'm finally writing clean extensible code). What this means is that models exported from TroTorted can be textured without a seam. While I was at it I added a sine wave to the tube thickness which you can see in the last picture. I'll post this updated TroTorted after more testing. (Models made in TroTorted, textured and rendered in blender)

Bio Cells Video

Some Biological Cells
by qqazxxsw

...About 5 different microscopic critters in motion. There's a hydra and some kind of paramecium (I think), don't know what the others are. Quality is pretty low for this first attempt; and the eye piece pointer is in every shot (I've since taken it out of the scope). I captured the video by simply holding the camera onto the eye piece with my left hand and controlling the stage, focus and lighting with my right, that's tricky.
This video at host if embed doesn't work...

biological cells

walkway paint in santa cruz

A raccoon outside my apartment window; it seemed to be humping the fence.

mazes

Homework for data structures class is to make mazes; just make.
A "maze" is a grid of hex values, to look at it you can't tell if it's a valid maze. To make sure my program was outputing good stuff I drew it, and drew and drew more...

Using Circa Sample

Here's a movie of circa being played with. I sped it up about 3 times. The movie is ~2 minutes, 4.5MB and shows a rendered version at the end. Sorry about the crude quality, the data went through several pipes...
CircaTwiddling.mp4
I think people might be confused on how to use circa, I'm trying to show how I use it. Dis a first attempt at a video tutorial.

graph drawing experiments

So, I'm in a "computer data structures" class and it's graphs and trees, trees and graphs... These are screengrabs from a java app to draw graphs. I wanted to do it myself first, but I've found two graphing libraries I may be able to switch to (GINY and JUNG).

This is the "Explore" window in the Trochoid app. Notice the center pattern is garbage compared to the others. The pattern in the center is where all the circles of the trochoid cancel out, putting the entire curve into the point <0,0>. In this window the drawing function tries to scale the pattern to fit it's place, but in the case of a point the scale becomes infinity and all the numbers go wack.

Trochoid ScreenSaver

Posted a trochoid based screensaver for OS X at the "Apps and Movies" link. (link in Blog Banner). Note: I think there's a problem with the 3App zip file upload (post below). I'll remark here when fixed. (I hope this screensaver upload works). Here's a screen grab after running for 10 seconds.

jint

stills

paleolith

IFS sequence... invertable

Found the code for IFS trochoids and it still compiles! Made this 9 pic progression...

found IFS

Here's some more IFS trochoids I found while meandering through 80 gigabytes of unorganized backup data; including the Sierpinksi like one.

Iterated Function System

There is a type of fractal called an iterated function system (IFS) that applies a 'function' to your 'system' then applies the function again and again to the output (iterates). I tried this for trochoids and below is one of the creations. In this case the system is the sequence of circles comprising the trochoid (a circle being 2 numbers, radius and frequency). The function is a list of simple functions. The simple functions...well, I'll show how it works sometime, it's difficult to explain.

As I was hoping, the trochoids are somewhat fractalish in being self similar. I couldn't find my favorite example though; it looked just like a (slightly bulged) Sierpinski Triangle. I should be able to remake it sometime....