Mirror Ball?

[barnes2000]

Is there a mirror ball obect for VW?

Scott

[Jonathan Pickup]

there is a sphere tool, cold you add a mirror texture to it?

[barnes2000]

I'll give it a try. Does VW have raytrace? If I focused lights into it, would it reflect the rays?

Scott

[CipesDesign]

Aha EJ, I knew you were familiar from somewhere... LOL

[islandmon]

Disco experience leads me to think of a Mirrored Ball as being composed of numerous little rectangular mirror tiles. is this the ball that you have in mind ? If so the light reflections are determined by the angle of the tile to the tangent of the spheric surfaces and therefore create a very distinct speckled pattern as we all know. It's pretty easy to build one from a single fractal surface if you really need it.

[islandmon]

Built a Disco Ball for the fun of it and posted the file on my server:

This page has a VRML of the Disco Ball as well as a link to the VW11 File with symbols & set-ups.

enjoy

[APE Design Ctr]

EJ, this stuff is totally wild. Can you write a step-by-step. You indicate it is fairly easy if you know the process. I bet all of us would love to see the logistics behind it.

Eddie

[islandmon]

Eddie- glad you asked ;>)

First download the VW file and look at the symbol 'spheric-1/8':

3D create for me requires analyzing the angle & frequency.

In the case of the MirroredBall the angle=90? and the frequency=6.

Then I reduce that to the minimum workable confirguration which can be duplicated to form a spheric surface. 4x90x2=720

All geodesics arrive at 720 sooner or later.

In this case 6 fractals can be duplicated in sets of 6 and rotated 15?/90?/180?to cover the surface of a spheric ball.

The frequency is the number of times the edges of a triangle are

divided. In this case 90/6=15? segments.

Basically, 6 rectangular symbols are required to fit into 6@15? slices covering the surface.Each of the symbols must also be scaled as they get closer to the axis of rotation Z.

The symbols also must be tangent to the surface of the curvature of a 90? segment in the X rotation. #1 rot 7.5?,#2 22.5?, #3 37.5?, #4 52.5?, #5 67.5?, #6 82.5?

( 6x6=36 fractal mirror pieces x4x2=288 mirrors( this can be doubled endlessly by 2x the frequency).

The spheric NURBS Surface of the 90/90 quadrant was created by revolving a curve around the central rail, but this surface is not required rather it is used to checksum the tangents of the fractal rectangles.

1)Find min. quadrant to equally divide spheric surface

2)Find min. frequency to fill quadrant by equal edge divisions

3)Find min. fractals to fill min. freq. of min. quadrant.

4)Rotate fractals to tangency of surface

5)Dup & Rot Z=15? group of fractal symbols to fill quadrant

6)Dup&rot quadrant Z=3@90?

7)Dup&rot hemisphere group Y=180?

there you have it.

[CipesDesign]

EJ, That's awesome!

[islandmon]

Yeah.. the fractal technique works great for most regular objects. Also consider that there are 23 other geodesic procedures which can be used to cover the spheric surface !

The one displayed is the simplest 6Frequency Octahedra shape that offers minimal realism. We've all seen those 12freq Disco balls made in India. The mirrored tile symbols can be easily subdivided to form the 12F spheric.

[grant_PD]

Here's another approach:

Make a black and white grid (4 white squares in a square formation, with black border).

Make a mirror texture and set the transparency to image, load the above image.

Mapping this onto a sphere will create a mirrored surface that is broken up into little squares.

the mapping will automatically taper the grid as you get closer to the poles.

[islandmon]

Excellent suggestion but it is too purely spheric and not fractal enough to give the 'disco ball' effect of distinctive fractal reflections.

The problem is that each mirror tile is a flat plane stuck to the tangent of the curved surface. Therefore, photons must interact with the limited tangents and maximum perpendiculars of flat rectangular surfaces rather than the maximum tangents and minimum perpendiculars of high frequency spheric surfaces.

[islandmon]

While we're on this subject. Why not build one out of multi-carat diamond studs set in crystal?

[Hunter B]

Now you're just showing off...

[islandmon]

Just showing the possibilities ... the fractal programming is basically the same for both balls... the diamond stud truncated icosidodecaheron requires just 3 fractal wheres the Disco Ball can be defined with 1 or more fractals.

[Andrew Bell@NV]

The lazier among us could achieve the same results with the regular polygon tool, splitting it in the middle, sweeping the resulting curve, and converting the result to polygons or to mesh. Or you can convert a sphere object to polygons or to mesh, setting the 3-D conversion resolution based on how many facets you want.

No diamond stud fractal though.

[Joe Golden ENT]

EJ, this looks cool but I can't find the set up info, only the symbol. I can't get it to look like yours, what am I doing wrong?

[islandmon]

The view is set up is on the Mod-Spheric-VRML Layer and requires that you set your Preferences > Display>Black Background ... yeah... I just opened the file with white background and the DiscoBall seemed to disappear ... oops!