Somebody... Give this woman a sim-wide show

Desert Rose: Spiral Threads #12, 1,000 prims


Posted by Bettina Tizzy
All photography and machinima by Suzanne Graves

I have an uncle who handily wins the prize for geekiest person in my personal sphere. The man has two interests in life and one of them is math. One Christmas years ago, as we all gathered round the tree for our gift exchange, my uncle showed up with a manila folder. When his turn came around, he explained that he'd spent the past several months creating art using math equations in his spare time and we could each choose one of his art pieces as our gift. This was my first exposure to the concept of fractals, and I've been indebted to him ever since. Oh, I know... it was such a dorky thing to do (and he is a dork!), but the fact remains, I love geek art.

I figure it has been two years now since I first became aware of an ardent explorer and photographer in Second Life by the name of Suzanne Graves. It must be about a year now since she hung up her traveling hat and began playing with scripts and prims. Random rotations, random locations, generative builds, animated textures, and more. Math-inspired art.

I'm here to tell you that this woman hasn't wasted a moment. Since her Slinky piece and Wireflower back in July, 2008 to date, Suzanne has discovered many more new tricks for making prims behave in arrestingly beautiful ways.

And now she is capturing these kinetic forms in her own machinima...


Viewable temporarily - along with two other sculptures by Suzanne - at Ars Simulacra. Teleport directly from here.
Music (c) Bertycox, Album: Synesthetism on jamendo.com

Suzanne calls this sculpture Sphere Balls as a play on words. "The spheres seem to be dancing at the ball," she explained. The piece, which she created quite by accident, consists of three similar sets of black and red spheres containing 200 spheres each that rotate in different directions simultaneously. Each of the three sets are positioned on an invisible/virtual bigger sphere, following a 3D curve on that big sphere.

"The size of each small sphere depends on the curvature of the 3D curve at its location. You may notice that the spheres on the top are smaller. Each "big" set is completed by (and linked to) an invisible prim, which is positioned at the center of the big virtual sphere, and this invisible prim responds to start and stop commands. I could add more commands such as changing the rotation direction, for instance," she added.

"The three sets of 200 spheres are concentric (their invisible prims have the same location), and the set in the middle rotates in an opposite direction relative to the outer and inner sets."

Because Suzanne's work is prim-heavy and script intense, it isn't easily displayed. In fact, I'm often frustrated because I don't know which sim or sandbox she is working in so that I can go and peek. I think it is time someone hosted a sim-wide show of her work. Don't you? Take a look...


Gold Box Sets


Spiral Threads #01


Spiral Threads #06

You can see more of Suzanne's work on her Flickr stream.

Suzanne Graves' exploding art

I'd come to know Suzanne Graves as an avid explorer and photographer, but recently she took up scripting and her art evolved from there.

Here are two examples that she showed me in a sandbox on Saturday.



On her blog she states, "I’ve always been fascinated by 3D math surfaces. You just pick some equation, and see what it produces. Change a parameter or two, and you have something different. I have spent hours and nights with Matlab or Mathematica doing this.

What a nerd.

When I started Second Life, I was expecting to be able to import math surfaces directly using 3D files. I was expecting to be able to build incredibly fun stuff. Then I discovered there were only… prims.

Argh. I don’t want to pile up cubes. But I can write programs which do that."

Mathematical Sunday with Seifert Surface

Ah, Seifert Surface! Every encounter with that postdoctoral mathematician is enlightening. Take today for example...

Bettina Tizzy: How are things at xyz? Teleport directly to Seifert's new sim, xyz, from here.

Seifert Surface: Just made a sculpty thing which is the graph of the function xyz = 1.


It is 24 prims all told. It would be 12 except that plane sculpties are "one sided," so Seifert needed twice as many.

Of course, I had to ask Seifert for a simplified explanation...

Seifert Surface: You have coordinates for points in space, x,y,z. You can ask, what are the points x,y,z so that xyz = 1? That is, you multiply them together and get 1 so, eg: if x, y and z are all 1, it satisfies the equation. 1,1,1 is on my graph, so is 1,-1,-1

Bettina Tizzy: But we are at 500mts, so how do you get 1?

Seifert Surface: Ah, yes, true. The center of this thing is assumed to be 0,0,0 for purposes of the thing, and it goes out to 8 and -8 in each direction... otherwise you wouldn't be able to see any of it. You know like the graph of y = x^2? If you see it on a computer screen, then the origin is not at the bottom left corner of the screen, and the scale is not 1 unit to 1 meter. You can scale and move the graph somewhere else, and it's still the graph of y=x^2. Same thing here. This is just a 3D version of a normal graph.

Bettina Tizzy: What applications can this be given?

Seifert Surface: Well, learning about functions. Unfortunately, it's a real pain to make something like this at present... something that you could use to quickly graph things would be very useful for teaching. You could have an extension to prims, in the same vein as for sculpties. With sculpties, you send a texture to encode the data of the shape. Instead, you could send the mathematical formula for the shape. Then we'd be in business and, of course, animated stuff would work well, too.

Bettina Tizzy: What is this shield item?



Seifert Surface: A prototype for the larger piece. I had a smaller range on the graph before, but it looks better with more. That one goes from 0 to 2. The big one is 0 to 8.



Bettina Tizzy: Fits better than a glove! More like skin.

Seifert Surface: Should be the exact same function. It fits!

It's bloomin' sculpties at Seifert Surface's "xyz" sim

This is Seifert Surface's new tree. In fact, he exclaimed just one word as I arrived: "tree!" And so it is! All 273 sculpty prims of it (with 4096 ends at the top).

It thrills me to see someone as cerebral as Seifert - a postdoctoral mathematician - take such pleasure in creating new, and often dazzlingly beautiful things. He just took possession of his new sim "xyz," and is still unpacking stuff, but the sculpture garden and the tesseract house are already in place.

He's still waiting on the sculpty implementation to get fixed. "This one with the tree seems stable-ish, but there are other, more complex ones (he has planned) that don't work reliably... the texture doesn't download properly all the time," he added.

He rezzed a poster-type board and asked me to tell him what it said. This item... I mean all of it, is just one prim. The letters are distinctly different from the base board. Etched, raised, finely sculpted, shadowed.



Seifert then asked me to zoom my camera away and tell him what the same poster said. "It tells you what your LOD (level of detail) is. It changes based on your distance from it," he explained. Ha!


Click to see large.

Teleport directly from here.