Works in progress

We are working on a number of new projects right now, so I am going to start regularly posting about them and their progress.   The posts will be in no particular order.  Some of the things will probably get no further than the state I first post them, and some will become products.I am working on a little script to turn 2D black and white images into a smooth 3D surfaces.  The basic constraints are the surface should be thicker as the 2D shapes get thicker, and it should be smooth everywhere.

My first attempt was rather straight forward.  I identified the edges of the shape.  Then from the edges I propagate inward making the surface thicker in a linear manner as I go.  This creates a very angular shape, so I then apply a function to smooth it out.  In this case I simply mapped the Z values of the surface from a line to a circle.The example I chose to test is a Turing reaction diffusion simulation.  You can read more about reaction diffusion here, but they are simply the study of a chemical reaction as it moves through space.  Reaction diffusion equations are currently used to model many biological patterns.  We may do more with them in the future.The resulting surface is pretty rough.  Some of that may be helped by making my mesh finer, but ultimately I think I am going to try a different approach.   My next step is to try an optimization method that attempts to make a smooth mesh with the edges constrained to a vertical tangent.