Syntopia

Although it is possible to use Structure Synth together with third party renderers (such as PovRay, SunFlow and Blender), it requires some… ingenuity.

The template rendering system offers a flexible way to export structures, but as of now the system is not completed and not documented at all. This mini tutorial offers an introduction for early (and adventurous) adopters.

For the tutorial, the following EisenScript may be used:
Nabla.es

Rendering the EisenScript as OpenGL inside Structure Synth results in something like the following:

Not very exciting.

Now, choose ‘Template Render to File… | sunflow.rendertemplate’ and save the resulting text-file as something with an ‘*.sc’ extension (A SunFlow scene description file) – for instance ‘Nabla.sc’.

Start SunFlow, choose ‘Open File’ and import the ‘*.sc’ scene file.

Next, by clicking ‘Render’ a nicely raytraced version of the image should emerge:

A few important points: as of now the camera settings are not exported, so in most cases it is necessary to modify the SunFlow scene file by hand. I’m working on this. Meanwhile, in the scene file look for the following code block:

camera {
   type pinhole
   eye    3.27743673325 -9.07978439331 9.93055152893
   target 0 0 0
   up     0 0 1
   fov    40
   aspect 1
}

For higher resolution images, modify the following lines to the desired resolution:

image {
   resolution 500 500
   aa 1 2
}

On Subblue’s blog I stumbled upon his Adobe Pixel Blender filter that recreates Escher’s Droste effect.

First a few words about Adobe Pixel Blender which was new to me. It is a toolkit that allows you to write filters in a C-like language, that are compiled and executed on either the GPU or CPU. They can be used in Photoshop, After Effects and even Flash 10 – making it possible to create very powerful Flash content. It is interesting to see that general-purpose computing on graphics processing units now are becoming mainstream, and no longer just an academic exercise.

The story behind Escher’s Droste effect is very interesting. It refers to the particular transformation Escher used in his ‘Prentententoonstelling’ lithograph (pictured above). The mathematics behind the picture was unraveled by a team of Dutch mathematicians in 2003 (it is ‘…drawn on a certain elliptic curve over the field of complex numbers…’) and is excellently described on their website. Several other software implementations exists, including one for GIMP and a plugin for Paint.net.

Double Droste Clock by fpsurgeon

Above is a modern example of using this effect, found on the Escher’s Droste Print Gallery Flickr group. By coincidence, the structure of this particular picture reminds me of the very first structure synth image I created.

To be honest, I never liked Escher’s original painting much. I’ve always found it to be too mathematical and fabricated and not very interesting. But the math behind it is interesting and the Flickr group really contain many great pictures.

Be sure to check out Subblue’s many excellent examples of his filter (note the video at the bottom!).