Computer naive art (2nd of October 2010, material from year 2006)
Constructive solid geometry (CSG) is a technique used to model complex three-dimensional objects. The idea is totally different from
a "typical" 3D modeling where the surface of an object is modeled as an union of many triangles with known vertices and
normals (such an object is typically called mesh). In case of CSG, the objects are modeled as an intersection, difference or union
of simpler bodies (so called geometric primitives). This logical, Boolean approach can be extended on many levels (e.g. I first
take a cube from a sphere, and then I look for an intersection of that with a cylinder and take all that from a pyramid...). CSG
is quite useful for scientific visualization, especially in physics, where one often uses geometrical models that are as simple
as possible (an old story of physicists who approximate cows by spheres). But, CSG can be taken a lot further and can be used to
model particularly complicated objects whose mathematical origin cannot be seen in the end.
The idea of this post is exactly the opposite - the idea is to be geometically naive, i.e. to model "the real world" so that its
geometrical inheritance becomes obvious. It is a sort of computer, geometric naive art. The image that opened the post shows
one such "naive" little piece of the world, a little island with houses on the shore and a little forest in the interior, roofed
by clouds and surrounded by waves.
A view of the detail of the image (above) shows all the geometical simplicity of houses (prisms and two rectangles as a roof) and the island itself (spherical cap). The sea is a superposition of several sine functions. The clouds are linked spheres (so called blob or >> metaball object).
The trees are some sort of cypresses, the trunks are cylinders and the foliages are surfaces made by a sphere moving along a certain path (that obviously wiggles), whose radius decreases in the process (in PovRay language this is called sphere_sweep object). So I obtained certain motion of the foliages. It is possible that the inspiration for such "cypresses" came from Van Gogh's Cypresses cycle (see below).
And the idea of a particularly narrow island with several houses along its shore came from the "real" world, after my vacation on the Ugljan island. Very near Preko and Kali on Ugljan there is Ošljak island, with an area of 0.332 km2. According to Croatian Wikipedia, Ošljak is the smallest inhabited island in the Adriatic. The length of the coastline is 2.41 km, and the highest point on the island is 90 meters high. I saw Ošljak two times from the ferry and both time it really impressed me. The photo I made then (04th of August 2006) is shown below.
To get an idea of Ošljak, it helps to look at the satellite images that I link from the Google Maps service in the space below. Use buttons "+" and "-" to zoom in or out (zooming out will clearly show the position of Ošljak with respect to Preko, Kali and Zadar).
And, in the end, let me conclude: if cows are not spheres after all, they could certainly be well represented by union, intersection and difference of spheres.
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Last updated on 2nd of October 2010.