Digital Art
Okay, I confess – while being an engineer, I do enjoy the occasional art show/gallery visit. I don’t get into a lot of the modern art stuff, or maybe it’s post-modern art, of which the term never made any sense to me. Anyway, what I do enjoy is digital art, especially art based on mathematical and scientific principles such as projections of 4 dimensional objects onto a 3 dimensional space (2 dimensions loose WAY to much information to make them useful for anything other than text-book material). Anyway, there’s an artist who has done some of this in metal no less: Bathsheba Grossman. There’s some really cool stuff there, go check it out!
The other thing that I enjoy looking at, and working with (though I don’t have the necessary tools or time right now) is completely digital representations of real environments. I’ve always wanted to work on a ray tracer/rendering tool – not to put it to market, but just for personal edification on the techniques of such a system. A company called Next Limit Technologies have come out with some really awesome tools that do much of what I would like to attempt: real-world physics renderers and fluid simulation tools – geared for presentation, not engineering (though they could be used for science). The renders may take longer, but the results from complex materials with internal caustics is simply stunning. Very cool stuff indeed! It’s times like this I know I’m a nerd: “Hey Joe, what would you like to do for fun?” “Why, I’d like to write a rendering engine based on the physics of the real world!” Just go look at the galleries
