Rick York - Professional Profile

Here are some shots of the robot simulators I made :
Five Axes[^]
Six Axes[^]
Seven Axes[^]
I went with a Fischer-Price coloring scheme with them. The six axes one was more of an experiment with a "knuckle"-style joint. It was amusing. I spent the most time on the seven axes one by far, including an experiment with inverse kinematics. My first, brute force, attempt was not successful. Either that, or I just haven't found the right parameters yet. I have the forward kinematics down pretty well but I want to have it make straight moves so it can move through the tray of cans.

These use the old-style, v1.2 OpenGL graphics calls. Everything is built as display lists of polygons so I should be able to adapt it to the new-style of Vulkan some day. That's a goal anyway.

BTW - these use higher order, hand-made object models. No modelling programs were used. They are all cylinders, torii, spheres, and boxes.

"They have a consciousness, they have a life, they have a soul! Damn you! Let the rabbits wear glasses! Save our brothers! Can I get an amen?"

Here it is : at ServImg.com[^].

That is my rendering of the image that caught my eye at the site mentioned in the previous post. I found that image absolutely fascinating and figured out how every aspect of it was drawn. Then I wrote a library to handle generating and drawing the objects necessary - spheres, cylinders, and torii. The spiral was generated by computing the points and then drawing spheres at those locations or drawing cylinders to connect them. The wire-frame torus is constructed of smaller torii. It was a lot of fun to do this and then I built the rest of the program around that and added drawing of other objects.

BTW - My approach and that of the author of the other site differ in that their renderings are all static images, usually raytraced. Mine are generated using OpenGL and can be rotated, translated, and scaled interactively using the mouse or buttons on the UI. I can also animate it so it rotates around any combination of axes. This particular image is the only one I made after getting the idea from that site but there are a few others I am thinking about.

"They have a consciousness, they have a life, they have a soul! Damn you! Let the rabbits wear glasses! Save our brothers! Can I get an amen?"

My avatar image is a shot taken from one of my programs called GLplayground. I use it to play around with various stuff in OpenGL. That particular one is something called a SuperShape. I call this object a "swollen asterisk." The SuperShape is an incredibly versatile mathematical construct. One can use it come up with all kinds of interesting stuff. I first ran across it at Paul Bourke's excellent website on geometry and related topics. Here is his page on it : Supershapes / SuperFormula[^]

"They have a consciousness, they have a life, they have a soul! Damn you! Let the rabbits wear glasses! Save our brothers! Can I get an amen?"

A while ago I ran across an website with some very interesting mathematically generated images. The site has been around a while so I have good reason to believe that the images were either ray-traced or used some other rendering technique. I recently got interested in 3D graphics again so I started trying to replicate some of the images on the site using OpenGL for amusement. By the way, the site is A Virtual Space Time Travel Machine[^]. When I started doing this I went to the site and saved a few of the images on my machine. This was just the simple "right-click and save image as" thing and I saved maybe six images. The other day I went back there and they have made the section of the site I was most interested in password protected. What the hell? I save six images to my machine and they think they have an access problem? I really don't get it. I have been doing this kind of thing (saving images) since the early 1990s and this is the first time I have ever seen a site owner react by restricting access to parts of it. That is the weirdest thing about it too. It is only that one section I saved images from that seems to be restricted which is what makes me think it was a result of what I did. FWIW, the section was called "Pictures of Mathematics." Is saving a few images something that would lead you to restrict access to your site? Also, what do they think I will do with those images, which were formerly publicly accessible, that could be so troublesome that they would restrict access to them? I find this all to be very puzzling.

Update : I can't find that section at the site now. I can find a section with the images I saved but it has a different title now and is not protected.

"They have a consciousness, they have a life, they have a soul! Damn you! Let the rabbits wear glasses! Save our brothers! Can I get an amen?"

Rick York - Professional Profile

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