42³

A 42-cube, which reads 42 from three directions, a project I have wanted to realise for fifteen years, but until recently I thought it was impossible. Then I realised that given appropriate rotations combined with an appropriate font, it could be done.

This quick mockup was made using NumPy, SciPy and Mayavi. Ultimately, I would like to have it in physical form, but there remains some tweaking for that to be feasible.

Rotating 42-cube.

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Depth sorting and flying objects

Guess what? It turns out, that rather than being trivial, sorting is one of the main problems in 3D graphics. The landscape renders ok, as long as the camera is not too low, it should be fine due to its ordered nature (small angles between neighbouring patches), but when it comes to more complex objects it becomes a hassle. There are no simple solutions, and no elegant ones, so I nearly gave up on it, until a friend (who is soon a Ph.D. in 3D graphics, and yet was kind enough not to laugh out loud at my dabbling in his field) pointed out that one can choose only to render surfaces whose normals point toward the screen. That is simple, it is almost elegant, and it solves much of the problem if care is taken when constructing the objects. Three cheers for science!

Below, you can see a picture of the “Lander-craft” (our hero-to-be) hovering over a landscape with a small house. The landscape is generated from data generated using pseudo-random sine waves, by way of an extremely circuitous route involving FFTs, binary morphology, and a lot of heuristics. Unfortunately, the engine of the craft is not visible in this view. Not that it’s visually very impressive, but I had to work quite a bit to get it to “stick” through triangle sorting… The next job is to make the demo interactive and implement some sort of dimming of the light with distance, neither of which should be too hard either…

Lander-craft (our hero-to-be) hovering over a landscape with a small house. Click for full-size! (CC: BY-NC-SA-2.5-SE)

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Autumn of the Pelicans #1

This is part of a very long project, and as I’ve finished a rough draft of the first part, I decided to post it here, possibly for some feedback (but will I listen to it?).

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I’ve always liked the autumn rains…

(Go here to read the story first, if you prefer not being spoiled!)

When I was in primary school, I remember that I always used to go outside on breaks on rainy days. I must have been around the age of nine, since that was the age at which I started reading SF, and my young imagination turned my rain-clothes into a space suit and the school yard to the surface of distant planet of torrential, icy rain. I was an explorer, protected only by the thin outer skin of the suit, a foreigner on a foreign world. I would just stand there, letting the droplets fall on my rain-coat, enjoying the feeling of almost, but not quite, getting wet.

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