In ye olde days, I designed stuff in POV-Ray to render whatever fantastical scenes I was imagining. I’d spend hours figuring out textures and constructive solid geometry to create images. It was a slow process. Files were extremely slow to render. On my trusty Intel 80386-based PC running DOS, a scene of any complexity would take all night to render at 640×480 pixels.

Now, 30-some-odd years later, I still play with a constructive solid geometry modeler — in this case, OpenSCAD. The idea is that I could output the models to a format like STL, and then 3D print them into physical being. I haven’t actually done very much printing of models, but it’s an interesting possibility nonetheless.

Below are some images from a work in progress. I was inspired by seeing the Breugels painting above in a YouTube video. The tower is not only a great metaphor, but an interesting image and architecture.

My architectural thoughts go more Gothic (more flying buttresses), and parametric. By parametric, I mean that I figure the design can be based on a set of variables, for example, the ratio of height to width of a wall segment. For each value of the variables, the code can generate the appropriate geometry.

My ability to create this way is limited by two things: my trigonometry is not particularly strong, and my ability to keep a stable 3D point of reference in my head is even worse. So I start with sketches and pages of cosines and arctangents, and then end up doing a lot by trial-and-error. Because thinking in this mathematical space is hard, I end up getting frustrated and putting the project aside for days or months before picking it up again. Not to mention, even with today’s super-fast computers, as the complexity increases, the time to render an image increases!

So, my tower of Babel is not complete. There’s been some progress. I played with it a little today. Maybe one day I’ll finish it. Perhaps I’ll even print a model.

I have tens of thousands of photos I’ve taken over the years.

I think some of these photos are pretty good, but most are languishing unseen on random hard drives.

To share them, I’ve been a member of Flickr, I’ve posted on the late lamented Twitter, and I post some onto Mastodon. I’ve also created numerous gallery applications/server scripts/web sites (e.g., Statgal), but they’ve generally been clumsy or take too much work to maintain. So I’ve been working on a dumb PHP/JavaScript slideshow thing that will scan directories, cache the details, etc.

Here’s introducing PhotoSpinner. It’s a quick’n’dirty script to provide photos. It’s very simple and allows me to publish categories of pictures without a lot of effort. Source code’s at Codeberg.

My math is abandoning me. I started out with the design below, which can be used to tile a plane. My thought was that I would rotate the “blade-like” hexagonal elements, since their shapes mesh almost gear-like when rotated in opposite directions. Behind them, the pinwheels would also rotate in alternating directions.

It’s not hard to convert a hexagonal tiling into rectangle tiles that will evenly cover a plane. In this case, drawing a rectangle from the centers of the the blade-like elements at 2, 4, 8, and 10 o’clock will work. Ah, but not necessarily if the elements are rotating! The rotations won’t match up. I’d need to expand the pattern and cut a larger tile from the expanded pattern.

Of course, it also quickly became obvious that I need to consider it a triangular tiling, not the hexagonal tiling that was in my head. With a triangular tiling, I can’t have the blade-like elements rotating in opposite directions because you run into this problem:

Naturally, any odd-numbered circuit will have the same issue. But say we treat the center blade-like element from the initial design differently, and replace it with a different shape, say. The six elements around it could rotate in alternating directions.

You’ll no doubt see where this is going. With this design, I could tile the plane. But what if I wanted a variation of this where the center elements, different though they were, still rotated? I end up back with a variation on my triangle problem.

So after that, I briefly considered going back and altering the original design, but instead decided I didn’t want to animate it after all.

:shrug:

So, back in January, I posted about being back on my BS with geometry programs. Not too long after that, I think, I got distracted and changed focus and didn’t work on the code at all.

Well, in keeping with the idea that it’s better to do something half-assed than not do it at all, I’ve posted the code, such as it is. It’s a kaleidoscope-like thing written in Javascript, and outputs in SVG for all your re-use needs.

The programs flaws are many. It uses only line segments, not splines, so curves are not smooth. It doesn’t actually merge the line segments into continuous shapes, so the resultant SVG files are huge. And it’s written in Javascript, so in addition to all the mistakes I’ve made, it’s got bugs that may not even be mine.

Still, I think it’s fun to play with. Maybe one day, I’ll write code to merge the line segments, and possibly weave overlapping lines into knot patterns (which was the original intent). But for now, here it is: Tiler.

I was doing my usual skulking about and chasing the garden hummingbirds, when this one made it clear it knew what was up.

(That’s not CG, AI, or fakery. The image is animated from two successive frames, shooting at 7fps)