Thomas de Groot wrote:
> I take of my hat and bow low, Shay.

Thank you.

> Your effort reminds me of a Chinese 
> story:

I wonder how the story ends. Does the patron buy the painting or walk 
out of the painter's studio shaking his head?

  -Shay

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Bill Pragnell wrote:
> Spectacular.
> 
> I especially like this because I honestly can see no way of doing it myself!
> Obviously we're all here because we know (at least a bit) about using POV-Ray
> to generate interesting imagery, but it does take some of the magic away when
> you look at someone's image and can see exactly how they've made it, even if it
> is stunning.
> 
> Bill
> 

Thank you very much.

I will give away just one little bit to share the fun that can be had 
with these types of models: so much can be done on paper. There are many 
"special" (like 30/60/90) triangles to be found within the shape. Much 
of this model, including all transformation matrices, was "figured" with 
a Bic pen while I was at work and away from any computer.

  -Shay

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john wrote:
 >
 > Have you seen what Goerge Hart has done with a very similar sort of
 > sculptures ?

Yes. Our "sculptures" are "very similar" in the way that all paintings 
on canvas are very similar. The finite number of forms around which 
"polyhedral art" can be built are visually distinctive as a group (more 
so than canvases) because most artists do not have the interest or 
aptitudes to work around these forms.

George Hart and I are wired in such a way that working on these forms is 
as straight-forward as working on a canvas; It is the paint applied to 
the canvas that matters. In this respect we are dissimilar. George Hart 
is making polyhedron art, I am using polyhedral symmetries as a 
mechanisms of iteration. What does that mean? Well, it means that George 
Hart's non-polyhedral works are foam "prints" of mathematical functions 
while mine are print works which employ other forms of iteration. 
Sculpture wise, it means that my sculpture would be heavier than his and 
that I'm not interested enough in the form itself to feel it "carries 
itself" as a shitty-looking piece of acrylic.

  -Shay

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Thomas de Groot wrote:
> I take of my hat and bow low, Shay. Your effort reminds me of a Chinese 
> story:
> 
> A rich patron visited a famous painter and asked him if he could draw a 
> life-like copy of a bird (I think it was a cock, but I do not remember 
> exactly) with one single brush stroke. The painter told him to come back a 
> week later. That day, the painter took a virgin piece of paper and painted 
> the bird in one single brush stroke. The patron was duly impressed and asked 
> the painter the price of this painting. The price was a very large sum of 
> gold. "What? said the patron, so much for a single brush stroke?". The 
> painter took him to another room which was stuffed full with countless 
> rejected trials of the bird. "It is not that single brush stroke that you 
> pay, but all the days and nights I have spent to reach perfection."
> 
> Thomas
> 
> 
Nice take on Shay's larger story about this piece.

But the story bothers me.  The painter should have called the patron an 
idiot and left it at that, imo.  I mean suppose he'd painted it in a 
single stroke first time then and there!  Would that be more, or less, 
impressive/valuable?

More purely in the art realm, either it is beautiful/stirring/etc. or it 
is not.  Does it matter if takes Mozart second, a week, or ten years to 
come up with a beautiful musical motif?  If two hundred years later 
hearing it played gets us out of our seats cheering madly,... then it does.

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Shay wrote:
> Much
> of this model, including all transformation matrices, was "figured" with 
> a Bic pen while I was at work and away from any computer.
> 



Yes, one of the VERY saticfying experiences you can have with POV-Ray, 
is to pull that off.

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On Fri, 05 Sep 2008 12:00:31 -0400, Jim Charter <jrc### [at] msncom> wrote:

>But the story bothers me.  The painter should have called the patron an 
>idiot and left it at that, imo.  I mean suppose he'd painted it in a 
>single stroke first time then and there!  Would that be more, or less, 
>impressive/valuable?

That's not the point of stories set in far-a-way lands. It is like
deconstructing a parable IM(ns)HO :)
-- 

Regards
     Stephen

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> 
> I don't share code.
> 
> It would take me weeks to clean it up,

Seeing the complexity of the object, I have no difficulty to understand 
that :-)




> More importantly, I feel that sharing to much of the "how" robs the 
> magic from the "what."


I don't know... Sometimes knowing how it is done can also deepens the 
mystery : 'ok, I know that I get this by doing so and so, but why is it 
so appealing?'

In fact, apart from the complex symmetries and transformations, I am 
also wondering how you got the coloring of each individual piece with 
hand-coding (I have not the least idea how to get such a coloring excpet 
with UV mapping)!

Thibaut

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Jim Charter wrote:

> But the story bothers me.  The painter should have called the
> patron an idiot and left it at that, imo.  I mean suppose he'd
> painted it in a single stroke first time then and there!  Would
> that be more, or less, impressive/valuable?
> 
> More purely in the art realm, either it is beautiful/stirring/etc.
> or it is not.  Does it matter if takes Mozart second, a week, or
> ten years to come up with a beautiful musical motif?  If two
> hundred years later hearing it played gets us out of our seats
> cheering madly,...  then it does.

Painting the bird in a single stroke the first time would have been less 
valuable. Could the painter have done so and had he called the patron an 
idiot, the patron would have walked across the street and purchased 
another single-stroke painting of a bird. APTITUDE IS COMMON. The more 
art I see, the more certain I become that *the* open frontier in art is 
work ethic.

I will say of my own picture, despite its flaws, that although a person 
may not find it beautiful or stirring, nor understand why it took me 
months to complete, he won't often see another like it. The form can be 
repeated, but the details I have taken the time to include, however 
minuscule, are *something* extra-ordinary he can take from it. That 
cannot be said of a thousand nude photos one could download from the 
Internet, no matter how beautiful/stirring/etc. those photos may be.

  -Shay

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Shay wrote:

> 
> Painting the bird in a single stroke the first time would have been less 
> valuable. Could the painter have done so and had he called the patron an 
> idiot, the patron would have walked across the street and purchased 
> another single-stroke painting of a bird. APTITUDE IS COMMON. The more 
> art I see, the more certain I become that *the* open frontier in art is 
> work ethic.

Yes, but need you show the room full of 'dirty linen' every time just to 
prove the worth of the result?  That worth should be manifest in the 
result alone, should it not?  I think the painter was, at a minimum, 
very patient with his patron.  Perhaps my impoliteness would be a poor 
thing, but in the painters place, I surely would have let the patron 
walk across the street and buy another artist's painting, if all he 
apparently wanted was a low price for a single stroke of the brush.



> 
> I will say of my own picture, despite its flaws, that although a person 
> may not find it beautiful or stirring, nor understand why it took me 
> months to complete, he won't often see another like it. The form can be 
> repeated, but the details I have taken the time to include, however 
> minuscule, are *something* extra-ordinary he can take from it. 


The latent craftmanship of a work, is something most people can respond 
to and take pleasure in.  You have always concerned yourself with 
latencies in artwork, latencies often beyond craftmanship alone.  It is 
the common thread, to my mind, in the various work I've seen you do over 
the years.  I is a level of awareness that I value very much, even if I 
don't always pursue it myself.*

*Craftsmanship is quite important to me though.

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Stephen wrote:
> On Fri, 05 Sep 2008 12:00:31 -0400, Jim Charter <jrc### [at] msncom> wrote:
> 
> 
>>But the story bothers me.  The painter should have called the patron an 
>>idiot and left it at that, imo.  I mean suppose he'd painted it in a 
>>single stroke first time then and there!  Would that be more, or less, 
>>impressive/valuable?
> 
> 
> That's not the point of stories set in far-a-way lands. It is like
> deconstructing a parable IM(ns)HO :)
Simple, old story, hoary, old debate. I'm up for it.

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