Monday, January 21, 2008

Curriculum Notes

My closer readers know I'm into a mix of Pythonic Algebra and Synergetics, in that my polyhedron modules tend to follow the proportions given them by Bucky in terms of a "concentric hierarchy" (of polyhedra: tetrahedron, cube, octahedron, icosahedron, rhombic triacontahedron and like that).

There's also a melding with movie industry jargon in that I make a big deal about "real time" versus "render time."

The former, used in game engines, supplies human speeds of interactivity, whereas render time is superhumanly slow, unless you beef up with amazingly powerful rendering farms, and even then, the pipeline is different.

A real time engine'll use quaternions to keep Alice oriented vis-a-vis her world and your viewpoint. Rendering involves POV-Ray type scene descriptions driving a ray tracer.

Both involve textures, plus rendering chips are pushing more realism to the screen every day, so I'm not saying the current skill mix and industry standards are set in stone or anything.

I just want my students to have a clue. This is ToonTown after all.