CS 285: SOLID MODELING

Lecture #3 -- We, Jan. 25, 2006.


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The Power of Interactive Parametric Procedural Design

Around 1994, I started to collaborate with Brent Collins, a wood sculptor from Gower, MO,
who had been creating abstract geometric art since the early 1980s. The result was:

Sculpture Generator 1

This was a very special-purpose program, designed to just build those warped chains of holes and saddles.
To create other sculpture families, I needed something more general, more modular:
We added some modules to SLIDE: e.g., a powerful sweep utility, and offset surfaces.

The interactive adjustability via sliders comes in particularly handy when you need to optimize aesthetics (see above),
or bring some parts in contact with one another, where the mathematical expressions would be horrendously complex.

More on SLIDE

The best way to learnSLIDE is by looking at examples, and by modifying those examples.
You should always have the SLIDE Language Specification Page open when you write SLIDE code.

Some SLIDE and Tcl Basics

Look in:  http://www.cs.berkeley.edu/~sequin/CS285/CODE/

To get familiar with SLIDE, play with:
Cube.slf
BorLoopTex.slf
KG3Q60paramOptim.slf

To see what can be done with Tcl, look at:

Instancing.slf
Gear.slf
GearMovie.slf
BevelGearMovie.slf

Advice: Do not write Tcl code from scratch!   Take a working file and make small changes between test runs.

Install SLIDE on your own computer as quickly as possible.

General instructions how to do this can be found here: http://www.cs.berkeley.edu/~ug/slide/viewer/slide2004/README
More information for the Windows system are here: http://www.cs.berkeley.edu/~ug/slide/pipeline/assignments/instructions.shtml


New Homework Assignment#2:

Install SLIDE, and  create a 5-variable Venn diagram with 5-fold symmetry.


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