My art and other stuff page

.. so here something more, as I told you I still have to find some other pictures to put here.

When I'll find them I will put an advice in the "news" section and I'll add some new pages.

Here I wish to show you two things, one simple and one quite complex.

Time ago I got very "addicted" to a chaotic attractor I found described in Pickover's book "Patter Chaos and Beauty" I imagined for long time how it had to be seeing it in three dimensions.

I had no idea about how to render it till I found a real interesting article in one IEEE Computer and Graphics magazine about "volumetric rendering" describing the implementation and use of the so called "Grey level Gradient and Adaptive Grey level gradient" algorithm.

Using that I finally found a way to see what I was just imagining ...

I wrote a couple of C programs, one called "attractor.c" calculates the attractor and fills a 3D array of data containing the attractor itself this is used to fed input to another program called "volrend.c" that performs the rendering.

The rendering is performed using a ray-casting technique (i.e. stop at the first intersection, no reflected or transmitted ray) then GLG or AGLG is used to generate a normal vector, Phong illumination model with some variations is used.

I created a still and an avi movie of 80 stills put together showing the attractor rotating on itself, this is my very first time I publish such thing.

Both programs have a long story, they have been developed first to run on a VAX 11-780 machine, it was our students mainframe at the university that was called UTS882, both program accept input as text files containing parameters and volrend outputs a TGA file containing the image so no user interface.

Then they have been ported to Sinclair QL, Amiga, Machintosh, HP-UX workstation and finally on PC .. 

front view

You can download the avi movie following this link the movie is 1.343KB long.

.. rotated	.. from another point of view ..