illustrating & animating mathematics
is there any nice way to generate a mobius strip (from the computer graphics point of view)? i am doubtful. you won’t get it parametrically (normals are messed up; closure is a pain) and don’t try realizing it implicitly in 3-d 😉
i think it helps to have a fattened boundary, as well as to have the surface partially translucent (fresnel shader) with some subtle reflectivity. this definitely looks much better when animated, but you’ll have to wait for BLUE vol 4 to hit youtube for that…
this is day 3 of trying and failing to properly animate stokes’ theorem in 3-d. stills are not hard: it’s the animation that’s rough.
so, as a way to procrastinate (& practice), here is a cartoon drawing of a sheaf of vector spaces over a graph, thought of as an algebraic data structure.
this has a nice greyscale scheme, with good sense of scope. it does not do a very good job of suggesting the heterogeneity of the stalks, nor the linear transformations between them. but you can’t have everything.
when i started doing illustration for calculus BLUE, i had insufficient appreciation for the technicalities of hidden lines. it’s taken me a long time to really understand how they can best be used, and i’m still learning. here are some simple examples from the exercises in the e-text version of volume 4, used for induced orientations in stokes’ theorem.
none of these are particularly good or deep examples. yet the combination of the hidden lines and the shading makes such a difference in grasping the surface. when we get to colors, thicknesses, and intersections, there will be much more to discuss…