[chiplotle-discuss] Superformula for Supershapes

[douglas repetto]

Cool!

These new compound commands makes me wonder whether we should look at 
some existing general purpose vector drawing packages to see whether we 
can use them instead of reimplementing everything from scratch. If we're 
going to have a few standard vector methods, it would make sense to 
figure out how to have a large library of them.

Victor and I have already talked about expanding Chiplotle to more 
general purpose control of CNC machines -- gcode for cnc mills, for 
example. So there's a kind of tension between Chiplotle as a simple 
wrapper for hpgl files/commands, Chiplotle as a simple wrapper for 
generic vector-based machine control, and Chiplotle as a general purpose 
drawing language.

I've seen various projects recently, for example, where people have used 
Processing to generate drawings and send them to plotters.

Since Chiplotle is Python-based, maybe we should start looking at 
existing Python vector graphics packages to see how we can interface 
with them? I tried something like that in my camera->plotter project:
http://music.columbia.edu/~douglas/strange_things/?p=343

But I couldn't get it to all work in Python, I ended up using several 
external command line programs.

Just thinking out loud.


douglas


On 3/14/10 3:48 PM, architetto francesco fantoni <hva - hermanitos 
verdes architetti> wrote:
> I've committed to the repo a new class:
>
> Supershape, it uses the 'superformula', a generalization of
> superellipses first proposed by Johan Gielis.
> It can be used to make nice shapes often found in nature.
> see this:
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Johan_Gielis
>
> the compound command is:
> Supershape(xy, width, height, m, n1, n2, n3, points=1000,
> percentage=1.0, range=None)
>
> width and height, well, are width and height
> m, n1, n2, n3 are the parameters tha control the curve
> points is the number of points we use (less is less accurate)
> percentage (0.0-1.0) is how many of this points we use (0.5 will draw
> half of the curve)
> range is the angle we cover with the curve, default is 2*pi for a closed
> curve.
>
> for example you could try something like:
> s = Supershape((0,0), 1000, 1000, 1, 0.5, 0.5, 0.5)
> that draws a drop-like shape, or
> s = Supershape((0,0), 1000, 1000, 8, 0.5, 0.5, 8)
> for some sort of cloverleaf
>
> best,
> francesco
>
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>

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