brainwagon

Without further ado… if you want code to implement this: You can download this this zip file. Do with it what you will.

Three years ago, I wrote a short post about volume rendering. I always meant to follow up, because I finally sorted out the problems with generating multiple, overlapping images. Here’s a new video generated with the improved code: Fourier volume rendering is less flexible than raytracing, but it does have certain computational advantages, most notably [...]

More important help for the budding young electronics designer: Little known fact: If you wire up an LED backwards, it actually works as a dark-emitting diode. 12/7/2011 3:38 pm via webReplyRetweetFavorite @EMSL Evil Mad Scientist Note: this also works in computer graphics quite well. Just specify a negative intensity for the light value.

I was inspired by some Haskell code written by keegan, so I had to write a version of it in C. I didn’t do any animation, but I did have a lot of fun playing around with the parameters. For instance, check out the code, and how changing the value of N from 5, 7, [...]

I’ve received two requests for information about my “video production pipeline”, such as it is. As you can tell by my videos, I am shooting with pretty ugly hardware, in a pretty ugly way, with minimal (read “no”) editing. But I did figure out a pretty nice way to add some watermarks and overlays to [...]

Back in 2000, I was intrigued by the various demos that I saw which attempted to implement real time raytracing. I wondered just what could be done with the computers I had on hand, without using any real tricks, but just a straightforward implementation of ray/sphere and ray/patch intersection. As I recall, I got two [...]

The problem with working some place with lots of intelligent people is that it is increasingly hard to maintain one’s sense of superiority. Today, I tip my hat to Inigo. He has a very cool demo here, where he creates a program by creating and editing a small image in photoshop, saving it as a [...]

Nearly thirty years ago, I remember hacking together some simple code to display graphics on a WYSE 35 terminal. The terminals supported the TEK 4014 graphics commands to draw vectors, and I found the original “Hershey Fonts”, created by A.V. Hershey at the U.S. National Bureau of Standards, and placed in the public domain. I’ve [...]

A couple of months ago, I did some simple simulations of light refracting through raindrops in a hope to understand the details of precisely how rainbows form. The graphs I produced were kind of boring, but they did illustrate a few interesting features of rainbows: namely, the double rainbow, and the formation of Alexander’s band, [...]

While hacking a small program today, I encountered something that I hadn’t seen in a while, so I thought I’d blog it: My random number generator failed me! I was implementing a little test program to generate some random terrain. The idea was pretty simple: initialize a square array to be all zero height. Set [...]

A few days back, I simulated how light propagated in a single drop of water, but with a number of problems. First of all, it didn’t simulate the Fresnel equations, which describe how light is reflected and refracted at the interface between two media. This meant that in my simple model, no light is actually [...]

In my re-reading of Levy’s book Hackers, I was reminded of an interesting bit of programming lore regarding an early display hack that Marvin Minsky did for circle drawing. It’s an interesting hack because the lore was that it was originally coded by mistake, and yet the result proved to be both interesting and even [...]

I’ve been interested in techniques where amateurs can digitize images and models for quite a bit. This website percolated to the top during today’s relaxing web browsing: it’s pretty spiffy, and is interesting on a couple of fronts, not the least of which is that the author designed the gearbox for tracking a laser using [...]

Back around 1984 or so, I first became interested in computer graphics. I was going to college at the University of Oregon, and we didn’t really have any graphics courses or any computers that you would think would be good at displaying graphics. Eventually they got a Tektronix 4115 terminal (which was huge, and cost [...]

I keep thinking that I should build one of these, but have never gotten around to it. Bookmarking this interesting link for future reference: Build Your Own 3D Scanner: Optical Triangulation for Beginners. Build Your Own 3D Scanner: Course Notes View more documents from Douglas Lanman.