READ_ME for AS9 Sculpture Folder

In this folder you find several examples of procedurally generated geometrical sculptures. Some of them use sweeps, other use instantiation, and yet other ones refer to meshes that were generated with a different program, e.g., Brakke's Surface Evolver. These models are not just simple textbook examples, but are all instances of work that came out of research projects, conference submissions, or artistic competitions. Some of these models thus look more complex than anything one would have written just for this assignment. The SLIDE files often contain rich parameter menues that were used to optimize the particular final shape that you now see. These menues have been left in place to give you different models of how to make menues for your final project. For Assignment#9, you should just accept the default values set in those menues. If rendering efficiency becomes an issue, you may replace the dynamic tcl expression with the corresponding initial value.

The images displayed below are photographs taken from small models made on a rapid prototyping machine. They may give you a first idea of how to take a simple piece of geometry and turn it into a sculpture: Put it on a pedestal, create a little bit of background or surrounding terrain, and choose a good viewing angle.
Here is an example of such a virtual sculpture, and a similar geometry in a different setting.
And here is a more sophisticated rendering that took 40 hours of rendering time!!

Here is a little background on some of these abstract models and sculptures:

	DodecaHamPath This is work in progress for a presentation at the 2005 Art-Math conference in Banff. It represents a Hamiltonian cycles (a closed path that visits every vertex of a given graph exactly once) on the edges of regular dodecahedron.
	DualDodecaPath This sculpture is an enhancement of the above idea. It is based on a Hamiltonian cycle running over the edges of a stack of two dodecahedra.
	G6QSD Another geometrical form, all built from quadrilateral, and thus suitable for texture mapping.
	DodecaDblShell Shows such two congruent Hamiltonian cycles covering all the edges of a more complex graph -- the prismatic extrusion of the 3D dodecahedron into the 4th dimension (and then perspectively projected back to 3D).
	IcosaVolution This is minimal surfaces with two tunnels (produced with Brakke's Surface Evolver), spanning an outer wire frame that is again a Hamiltonian cycle on a regular polyhedron -- an icosahedron.
	TrefoilBand is a model for the first stage of a snow sculpture to be carved out of a 10x10x12ft tall block of snow at the International Snowsculpting Championships in Colorado in January 2005.
	SplitKnot This shows the final shape that we hope to achieve, by splitting the Moebius band shown above lengthwise into a single double-length thread.