Graphics Primitives

In class, we discussed several "classes" of graphics primitives. Here is some more information on each:

• Triangles which can be tied together to make a mesh.
  
• Splines which can be used to form surface patches, for example NURBS.
  
• Subdivision Surface which is similar to Splines but have a very simple and intuitive construction mechanism.
  
• CSG or Constructive Solid Geometry, which builds complex objects from simple primitives.
  
• Volumes which represent not only the surface of an object, but its interior as well. (Good for smoke, clouds, etc..)
  

What are the advantages and disadvantages of each primitive? What other primitive types or variations could we add to this taxonomy?

Sphere Gallery

Spheres are the most basic graphics primitives. Here is a gallery of some not so basic sphere designs. Have a look, this gallery might inspire some novel "bouncy ball" animations.

Learning some Photoshop

I really learned how to use Photoshop doing graphic design and typography. Here is a long list of text effect tutorials for Photoshop. Do one! and discover some new Photoshop features and techniques.

ImageMagick

ImageMagick is a free tool for manipulating images. It generally works on the command line, but also supports python (perhaps it's better to say python supports it, whatever). You can locate and install ImageMagick multiple ways. A quick web-search will help you figure out how you need to do it. I run OSX so I used "macports" to install it: sudo port install ImageMagick Once you get it installed make sure you can use it by typing convert -version at the command line. You should see some information about ImageMagick (including it's version, I see 6.1.8) and the options that convert takes. If you don't see this useful information you need to keep working.


There do exist python bindings for ImageMagick, however after about four hours of hacking I couldn't find compatible versions of ImageMagick, Magick++, PythonMagick, and Boost to make it work in python. Perhaps I'll come back to this topic later, but for now we will focus on using the Python Imaging Library (PIL).