Embedding Models? + El Thetarino
To paraphrase Kazez: Why look it up when I can just ask you?
So I could spend a lot of time googlin’ and researching and not coming up with anything, or I could just ask the good wholesome people of the internet. Anyone know a method of embedding models into this blog so that people can at least easily rotate and perhaps pan and zoom?
And just so there’s a picture. An order 2 Scharlemann cycle gets its brown “corners” identified to form a Mobius Band. An order 3 Scharlemann cyce gets its brown “corners” identified to form a Whatchamacallit Band. I’ve been calling it a Twisted Theta Band since the induced boundary graph is a theta-graph, but it’s not just a product theta-graph. Idunno: the Threebius? Tribius? Threeta? El Thetarino if you’re not into the whole brevity thing?
I would recommend jReality (www.jreality.de) that has support for lots of formats, OpenGL (applets, CAVE envirionments etc) and is made especially for visualization of mathematics. Do you simply want to display models or also animate them?
If you need any help developing an applet with jReality I’d be happy to help you, since I’d be happy to help with a blog that I like.
Call it irregular slacks.
I vote for “Möbius pants”.
I just got the Big Leboowski reference. Nice one..
If you have access to Mathematica, LiveGraphics3D makes nice embeddable 3D graphics with rotate & zoom.
http://www.vis.uni-stuttgart.de/~kraus/LiveGraphics3D/examples.html
Thanks for the link JS. Some neat examples there. I didn’t know about LiveGraphics3D.
A month or so ago I had modified the Mathematica code for Apery’s parametrization of Boy’s surface that appears in Carter’s book to be one of the Mathematcia Demonstrations so that you could mess with parametrization. But the Mathematica installation on the machines I’d been using had some issues with 3d graphics libraries and would quickly crash. So I haven’t yet uploaded it to their repository.
Once I get on a suitable machine, I’ll have to try making that into a LiveGraphics3D.
Processing might meet your needs- it’s getting a lot of use recently in applets. The syntax is similar to Java, and since it’s so hot right now in the design world, you can find oodles of documentation for it.
Here’s a link: http://processing.org/
Take a Mobius strip with three flips. Cut it down the middle and you get a loop. with a trefoil knot and 8 twists. Give the paper six intersections and the twists are gone, draw the fat graphs knot diagram. Why does it take 6 intersections to flatten the curves? you tube “mobius strip knot diagrams”
Javaview is used on many webpages
http://www.javaview.de/applications/index.html
Thanks Lars. Javaview looks promising since it will load obj files and both Sketchup and Rhino export to obj.
Still have to figure out how to get the colors to transfer though. Right now all my models are a uniform pale blue when loaded into Javaview.
maybe you already know about the sketchup web exporter:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j0Tmlko5YTU
i haven’t tried this myself yet, but it looks promising and pretty easy to use.
Currently that web exporter is setup for MS Windows. But I adapted its script to produce some images on The square and granny tangle. WordPress doesn’t seem to permit the embedding of java, so you have to follow some links. Here’s one of them.
Hi Ken,
Did you get anywhere with LiveGraphics3d (or other software)? I’d like to embed stuff like this: http://mathworld.wolfram.com/TruncatedSquarePyramid.html into my own blog http://www.mickybullock.com and would be interested if you had found a way! Cheers
Hi Micky,
I haven’t found any satisfactory method yet for getting my models embedded. Every method I’ve tried has had one drawback or another.
As for LiveGraphics3D, most things I’ve made aren’t so easily done with Mathematica, so I haven’t bothered myself too much with LiveGraphics3D. The Mathematica Demonstrations, while not embeddable, allow others to download, view, and manipulate… so that may be an option.
There seem to be more options coming available for SketchUp, especially if you run Windows.
Depending on what kind of interactivity you want, you can cheat things by creating an array of snapshots and using java to control their display. This is what I was referring to in the previous comment.
Let me know how it goes for you!