Sunday, April 27, 2008

Tech Art

Thought I share some screenshots with you guys. These are from a project that I did a while back in college (undergrad). It was for a computer graphics course. We were supposed to make a computer program that could manipulate a 3D object. I got really into it and came up with a really nifty shape to mess around with. Other people just stuck with cubes, boring.


I fleshed out the shape in Flash. To get a feel for the coordinates. They have to be passed as parameters to an algorithm that converts them into 3D coordinates.

The actual application was built with Visual Studio .NET using MFC. Notice how the menu bar comes with a host of options for manipulating the shape. Scaling was the most difficult option to implement.

Here are some "action" scenes of the shape after it had received various transformations. The last one looks kinda cool. Like a space tunnel leading to someplace exotic. I got a good grade on this one which makes sense I had fun making it and it showed. Now that I think about it I am always happiest when dealing with things that combine technology and art. Like Science and fiction or computers and programming.
People say well programming is a discipline and anyone can do it as long as they have a reference manual handy. Not so. The reference manual will tell them what to program not how to program. The how comes from the programmer who comes up with novel solutions to problems using his experience and intuition. That is the art.

No comments: