A Topological Picture Book, Rendered

(e-infinity.space)

105 points | by mathgenius 12 hours ago ago

11 comments

  • e-infinityspace 5 hours ago ago

    This is my project — thanks for the interest. I just made it more mobile / small device friendly.

    The app is primarily based on ideas of Hertzmann and Zorin in [this paper](https://cims.nyu.edu/gcl/papers/hertzmann2000iss.pdf), using directions of principal curvature for hatching directions.

    • nxpnsv 5 hours ago ago

      Pretty, and a lot of fun to tweak around the parameters.

  • sevensor 10 hours ago ago

    I was an undergraduate student of George's many years ago and it's an absolute delight to see these renderings. He used to doodle them on any available surface -- blackboards, notebook paper, napkins, what have you -- often with a fountain pen. He was also big into using computers for visualization and had a number of programs that ran in the CAVE.

    • jjtheblunt 9 hours ago ago

      I was a grad student of him, all you describe resonates, and i still stay in touch nearing 40 years later. some of the happiest most fun stuff in grad school, and there were endless nerdy fun pursuits. i'm so grateful i learned under him. it was incredible to see him drawing.

  • sheept 7 hours ago ago

    In addition to making the sidebar dismissable on small screens, it'd be nice to add touch-action: none to the canvas so rotating the object doesn't get interpreted as a scroll on touchscreens.

    Right now, at least in Android Chrome, dragging to rotate only works briefly before it's interrupted.

  • ekzhang 10 hours ago ago

    The spacing and style of the hand sketched lines are really perfect. Was it hard get such clean drawings, even using principal curvature fields?

  • fogleman 10 hours ago ago

    Very nice. I've been inspired by the same sources and have always wanted a way to render such drawings for any arbitrary 3D model (e.g. STL file). I've played around with that quite a bit, even recently with LLM assistance, but haven't yet gotten it as good as I want. Eventually...!

  • gotfork 9 hours ago ago

    This is awesome, what an incredible project!

  • medwards666 3 hours ago ago

    Absolutely beautiful.

  • ks2048 10 hours ago ago

    Is there a way to hide the menu on mobile? The few pixels I can see do look pretty cool.

    • boguscoder 9 hours ago ago

      Going landscape seems to be a bit better..