It was discovered through play that by wrapping the outlying vertices of a group of tessellated Rhombic Dodecahedra with a convex hull, an approximation of a Truncated Octahedron was produced. Upon further investigation, it was discovered that an approximation of a Rhombic Dodecahedron emerged by wrapping the outlying vertices of a group of tessellated Truncated Octahedra with a convex hull.
Author: keegantawa
A space-filling polyhedron is one that can be used to generate a tessellation in space. That means that by duplicating and translating (not rotating) the shape, we can create a three-dimensional tiling that leaves no gaps between its constituent shapes. This is of course easy to visualize with a cube; things begin to get both messy and interesting when you explore tessellations with other non-platonic space-filling shapes. And so began my brief but exciting journey into the lands of the Rhombic Dodecahedron.
In Unity projects, especially for newcomers, creating a smooth camera action can be especially frustrating (it has always been frustrating for me). A camera script feels like it should be a simple piece of code, and generally, it can be - if you know the right API calls to make and how they work. This post describes the process of creating a simple, free-floating, lerping camera.
In the last technical post about the Icosphere, we designed and employed a Coupled Ring Search to detect the observation region. This is the region that we will break down into descendant triangles when the observer draws near enough – and eventually, pack back up into ancestor triangles when the observer retreats far enough.
As some of you might know, I moonlight as a musician. For the past two years, I've been working on a full-length record entitled Startide. I guess it should come as a surprise to nobody tracking this blog that it's about, well, space.
A loose and non-technical breakdown of how PISES generates random but realistic orbital hierarchies and geometries for multiple-star solar systems.
One of the most challenging issues in the Solar Scope is the issue of scale. On one hand, we want PISES to represent the realistic scales and distances between celestial objects - but on the other hand, we need PISES' views to be intuitive, tractable and visually appealing.
The software user may be the one to trigger the generation of a new world, but they are not the only entity in PISES which may be autonomously exploring new worlds. A procedurally generated species in PISES may very well be conducting explorations of its own, which can sometimes result in paradoxical outcomes.
For the past few months, we have been working on generating an orbital hierarchy of a solar system. We then took this abstract hierarchy and ascribed it with a set of Keplerian Orbital Elements. Finally, we used these orbital elements to build up hard position and velocity data for our orbital bodies. We now have everything we need in order to render and propagate these orbital bodies in Unity Gaming Engine.
In our final step before visualization, we must actually generate a series of positions and velocities for these orbital bodies, so we can draw them to screen and animate them. At this point, we have all the data we need.
superhedral 