carpent@SRC.Honeywell.COM (Todd Carpenter) (06/13/90)
Howdy, oh most puissant and noble Lords of the Net, aether, and Animation!
I have a need, and beg of thee, oh most High, that thou aid me in mine plight.
I am working on a scientific program that has an output consisting of a fairly
large set of 3D points (Actually, N Dimensions, but 3 is a good start). One
way of viewing this is as a 3_D surface. So far I have written a few
projection routines which do point, line and polygon drawing of these surface
in real time. Of course, it has limited resolution, and the surface is less
than ideal. Then, suddenly, an idea slimed its way through my mind: I have
Turbo Silver, that I *just* purchased from someone on the net. How about
building a TS script file that creates the surface, and let TS render it? I
imagine it would look incredible in crystal...
However, (and herein layeth mine plight), the manual makes no mention of
scripting capabilities. Heck, it doesn't even have an AREXX port (and I paid
$100 for the beast!). So my options are to build the object files directly, or
to ... (what?)
Are the object files easy to build? My data basically is a regular x,y grid,
with elevations at each point. I'd just connect the grid points with triangles
add a light source and generate away. No, I don't expect real time (although
my 2500/30 comes real close, especially with the TS '882 support).
I also have Sculpt 3D, in which I *can* write scripts, but I'd like to mess
with TS instead, due to the much better user interface (minus the lack of
scripting or AREXX), floating point support, and crystal or diamond indices of
refraction.
Anyone have any ideas to help me out? The person with the winning idea will
get a disk with the first picture I thusly generate... Not that it would mean
anything - it will be a 3D slice of the state space resulting from mapping a 6
dimensional hypercube onto itself... 64**64 points in the space, and I can
only see a teensy fraction at any one time. But hey, it's research!
Many thanks!
(email responses, please, unless you think the rest of the people on the net
would have any interest.)
Todd P. Carpenter Honeywell Systems and Research Center
voice: (612)782-7229 paper: 3660 Technology Drive, Minneapolis, MN 55418
UUCP: carpent@srcsip.uucp bang-style: {umn-cs,ems,bthpyd}!srcsip!carpent
Internet: carpent@src.honeywell.com or Arkon%kryl@src.honeywell.com