Composting the Past

Carl Friedrich Bolz's blog about what he finds on his hard-drive.

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Güterbahnhof Duisburg

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Autobahn: KOHORTE SEK🚃WET HANZ ? KOHORTE

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Some intermediate states of the beetle model before it was finished. The Wings3D file is in the repository.

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A model of stone scarab beetle. Modeled in January 2005 with Wings3D, rendered with POVray (as usual).

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A picture of the pen case in its current state.

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Some test renders for the pen case. The source code is also around.

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A Povray rendering of a pen case I had (I still have it, but it's a lot worse for the wear). Made this in 2003, not sure when.

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Found a picture of the analog version of the bottle.

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Some test renders that I did while working on the bottle I composted about yesterday.

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A glass bottle we had standing around, digitalized using manually written Povray code. Takes ages to render due to the caustics and reflections. The flower was generated by something, but I can't remember which program I used. I made the bottle at some point in 2004, but the file modification dates are wrong, so I can't be sure.

[cfbolz]

Magic Squares in QBasic

Found a QBasic program to compute n-odd magic squares using the Siamese method that I wrote in 1998. Here is the magic 11-square it computes:

68 81 94 107 120 1 14 27 40 53 66 80 93 106 119 11 13 26 39 52 65 67 92 105 118 10 12 25 38 51 64 77 79 104 117 9 22 24 37 50 63 76 78 91 116 8 21 23 36 49 62 75 88 90 103 7 20 33 35 48 61 74 87 89 102 115 19 32 34 47 60 73 86 99 101 114 6 31 44 46 59 72 85 98 100 113 5 18 43 45 58 71 84 97 110 112 4 17 30 55 57 70 83 96 109 111 3 16 29 42 56 69 82 95 108 121 2 15 28 41 54

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The customary hello-world of ray-tracing is a reflective sphere over a checkered plane. Here there is some chemistry glassware on a checkered plane, I made these in July and October 2000 by hand-writing POVRay files using constructive solid geometry.

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The recursivity of my ancestors (which are often called Carl). I made this fractal for my father's 50th birthday in December 2004. It's done with a chaos game, script is here.

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A small animation of a Möbius Strip, made with a Python script that generates POVRay files and then runs POVRay to render the individual frames. The normals of the Möbius strip are shown as arrows. I worked on this in June 2004.

POVRay is a ray-tracer that accepts a simple plain-text scene description language. I used POVRay a lot, both by writing scenes by hand and by generating them in some way, so there will be more posts with it.

[cfbolz]

Introduction

Recently I was sorting through my old files (spanning something like the last 10-15 years) and re-discovered a great number of projects and experiments. I was astonished that I had actually forgotten about a large number of them and also how amazingly unsorted all this stuff is.

Therefore I decided to start this blog to force myself to linearize and document my past endeavors. Sturgeon's Law applies to them, many are of questionable quality or aesthetics. Some of them are rather cool though. Most of them are 3D-graphics- or programming-related. Nevertheless, I will try to keep the blog somewhat non-technical.

I will make most of the source-code that I blog about available in this bitbucket repository