Sorry if this seems a bit off topic, but I’m working on finding the best way to present a new topological surface (similar to Boy’s surface.)
I’m pretty familiar with the surface myself now, and am looking for a bit of feedback as to how to best present it (it’s hard for me to judge since I know how it all goes together.)
So far I’ve been mostly using translucent models and wireframes. Does either give a decent impression of how the surface goes together, or should I consider trying something else such as piecewise construction or level curves? Thanks in advance for any suggestions you can give!
Both the videos are confusing for different reasons. The wire frame doesn’t give good depth cues, but it is hard to see the surface flow of the shaded version. I would say try to do both at the same time. Just create a linked duplicate of your object and set the origonal to shaded and the duplicate to wire. If you want to play with the compositor you could even do something fancy like have the wire change color/opacity based on distance from the viewer.
I took a look at the surface version (40 minute download) and it wasn’t much clearer than the stills you posted. I think you might want to try for animating the properties of the surface, rather than just take the static surface and rotate it in several axes.
I’m thinking of the classic Escher drawing of the Mobius strip, with the line of ants walking single file, obviously the strip has only one surface, but locally had two sides. Clearly illustrated the Mobius’ topographical principal. If you imagine the ants walking along, Escher even animated it!
Rather than trying to show how the surface goes together, try to show why its special.
Working from your guy’s kind suggestions I’ve tried the following:
As far as “demonstration” goes the only thing I could come up with was the build effect which seems to help a lot, but the video obviously needs to be cleaned up at some point so that it always faces the area where polygons are being added.
I tried doing the wireframe over translucent model, but for some reason I’m having a hard time getting a different texture on the duplicate of the shape (I probably just need to spend some time going through the manual.)
I’ll be spending some time this weekend working on demonstrations involving level curves - too bad CSG in blender seems to only work on meshes which inclose a defined area.
When you make the second texture make sure you click “ADD NEW” at some point. When you duplicate an object both duplis will point to the same material, you need to select one and assign it a different material before changing any settings.