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Workflowz & Design Tech

Equirectangular Rendering in POV-Ray

POV-Ray (Windows | OSX) is still one of my favorite tools for 3D rendering. In general it hasn’t changed much in the past 20 years, though I still experience the same joy scripting with it as I did 20 years ago.

Recently with the advent of consumer VR headsets, I’ve been experimenting with doing some equirectangular renderings inside of POV-Ray, and then viewing the results using Virtual Desktop on Steam with an HTC Vive. The results were somewhat surprisingly awesome in their effect.

The trick to get an equirectangular render in POV-Ray is two-fold.

  1. Use a camera with the type spherical, with the angle values of 360 180.
  2. Render out with a 2:1 aspect ratio, for example, 8192×4096.

camera {

spherical
angle 360 180
location < 0, 0, 0>
look_at <0,0,10>

}

That’s it! Use that camera and image ratio on any of your POV-Ray scenes to get a proper equirectangular output to use in any equirectangular viewing software. I added a template file for this on GitHub. Have fun rendering!!

Hecate Symbol Construction

In 2008 I was sleeping in a jungle resort in Thailand and I woke up with the unmistakable symbol from the dream, of the negative and positive space circulating and intertwining in a triadic circular pattern. My best scribblings lead to the vector symbol below labeled Dream Symbol.  Today the symbol of Hecate (Greek Goddess) was brought to my attention, and it appeared strikingly familiar, like the symbol from the dream. The actual Hecate symbol has a star in the center, though my focus has remained on the outer rim.

The above Workflow is a 15 minute session in Adobe Illustrator condensed into about 1 minute, showing the construction of the basic Hecate symbol.

 

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Symbol from a Dream next to the outer rim of the Hecate Symbol

Math GV

I was going through an old hard-drive today, and dug up a bunch of old math art (2001-2006) made in an old windows app called Math GV. This app differs from Mac OSX Grapher and Pov-Ray in many ways – it’s much more primitive in some ways, though since you can set the number of lines, as well as the beginning and end value of theta, a lot of cool effects can be achieved with Math GV which I haven’t been able to replicate on other graphing apps.

 

Chakra Vector Reflections

In 2012 I released a royalty free set of chakra vectors through the Pod Collective. Over time, reflections of the chakra designs began to spring up in unexpected places. The chakra designs were intended to be a gift to the internet in thanks for all the free images, vectors and code I’ve been able to use for free, and in this way it was very satisfying and rewarding to see how frequently they were downloaded.

Though over time I started to see some ways people were using the chakras which made me reconsider giving these particular designs away freely, including people reselling them more-less as-is to unsuspecting people, which was not part of the royalty free license. It started become clear that some people were using the designs in such a way which doesn’t honor the intended occult power of the chakra designs themselves, and I began to question how they are being distributed.

This should have been anticipated, right? Well in response, I decided to stop distributing the chakra designs, although it’s been interesting to see some of the reflections and creative ways that other designers and artisans have repurposes them. Here are a few images which I found on Etsy of various people using the chakra designs in cool ways.

 

 

 

Workflowz : Five Pointed Star Sigil A1

This video shows a one hour session in Adobe Illustrator CC 2015, condensed into a 2 minute clip.

A common principle in the sigil construction is maintaining consistency between positive and negative space, so the shapes and the space between the shapes interlock harmoniously. This can be easily achieved by using the same line widths for both the shape and the space.

The technique shown here uses harmonic measurements rather than linear cartesian measurements. The way this translates with the 5 pointed star harmonic, is that the shape and space line widths are not linear, with a subtle variation of growing slightly thicker as they approach the center.

Building with this technique uses snap to point method, based on an array of points around the perimeter, on which a custom grid is based. This makes a nice angular consistency in the position of the points. There were some minor complications in the procedure due to a bug in Adobe Illustrator CC, although the general principle can still be observed.

 

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Five Pointed Star Sigil A1 – Made in Adobe Illustrator, filtered with Instagram

POV-Lab

POV-Lab on GitHub – POV-ray is a 3d rendering app, which stands for ‘Persistence of Vision Raytracer’. I’ve only learned the basics, though a lot can be done with a few basic tools.

Pov-ray lets you do basic programming, like if, for, while, custom functions, objects, etc, with a total focus on 3d object rendering. Most geometry is done not with triangular faces but mathematically perfect solids. Due to this, rendering can take more time, than with faceted triangles, though the result is very smooth.

One of my favorite things about POV-Ray is that solids can be created in arrays which are controlled by mathematical functions, which can produce some fascinating (even animated) results. Many apps let you visualize math functions, such as Wolfram Mathematica, MathGV and Mac OS Grapher, though POV-Ray excels when it comes to outputting math to art.

One of my favorite ways of drawing art is using polar coordinates, so I put together a template and example POV-Ray files which sets things up for different methods of creation. The focus on Pov-lab so far is for making art with math.

Making art with math is an exciting way to stimulate the two hemispheres of the brain to work together.

If you have any experience with Programming languages, I think you will find POV-Ray relatively fun and easy to use. If you don’t have any experience with programming, then this is a great place to start!

Here are some random raw samples from some journeys with polar coordinates in POV-Ray.