3D Vector Graphics & Line Art 2016-02-02

If you follow my Twitter feed, you know that I've been making heavy use of the Makeblock XY Plotter that I recently purchased.

Seeing as how I've done a lot of 3D graphics before, I wondered how I could draw some 3D scenes with the plotter. What I came up with mostly resembles a ray tracer, but it sort of works in reverse. Basically, the scene is made up of solid objects like spheres, cubes, cylinders or meshes. Each solid has some 3D polylines on its surface. The engine finely chops up these lines, and casts a ray from each point toward the camera. If nothing intersects the ray, then that part of the polyline is visible. The visible portions of the lines are then transformed to 2D space and the output of the engine is a set of 2D polylines which can be saved as SVG, rendered to a PNG, or sent off to the plotter. Cool!

I based the code off of my Go path tracer. I ripped out a bunch of stuff that was no longer needed and then added the code to do what I just described above.

It's pretty easy to use, and I put some good examples and docs up on GitHub. Check it out!

https://github.com/fogleman/ln

This is probably my favorite 3D drawing so far...