Learning to count (1st of January 2010, material from year 2008)
Last year was... well, of all kinds. Both good and bad, depending on the aspect in question. It is interesting though, that I worked on solicited projects somewhat more than in years before. Right now, I am working on the graphics for a conference that I am also organizing (more about that soon), and I also worked on the title page for the book that should come out in the edition of Cambridge University Press sometime during this year. In year 2008, my friend and colleague Primož Ziherl asked me to make an attractive image from the data that he calculated. He wanted to propose the image for the title page of the journal in which he intended to publish his paper. I like this sort of work the most since it binds science and visualization, so that when I work, I get smarter in many different respects. Primož calculated a kind of model erythrocytes in interaction, i.e. how they stick to each other and deform in the process due to attractive interactions. One could say that it has something to do with the process of blood sedimentation. A result of Primož's calculation was a surface of these objects represented as a net (mesh) of points (vertices) arranged in triangles. The image below shows one model erythrocyte in which one can see flat triangles as basic elements of the surface.
Of course, the representation of objects and surfaces in general as unions of triangles is a standard matter in computer graphics, so that I represented Primož's objects in the language od 3D computer graphics in no time. In the background one can see whole "erythrocytes" (red), while in the first plan one sees the cross sections of erythrocytes (yellow) and surfaces between them (violet) along which they form contacts. In such a way, the image clearly expresses the information which is the basic and the most important goal of scientific illustration, but I hope that the image also has a certain aesthetic value, which is the ideal one always wishes to approach. I called the illustration "Learning to count" because it is in its essence a specific representation of numbers from one to five. In the process of making the final illustration, I made about ten different versions (different colors, arrangements of objects) and one of them that didn't make it to the final is shown in the image below ("Learning to count backwards").
It is nice that we made it in the end and that the illustration was published on the title page of quite a prestigious journal "Soft Matter" (issue of October, 2008).
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Last updated on 1st of January 2010