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Building Bauble

I made something that I think is pretty neat, and I want to tell you about it. This is a little hot air balloon made out of alternating layers of brass and bronze that lock together with these angled facets: It’s 3D printed, sort of, but it really is solid metal – it’s not a metallic filament. It’s made by “lost wax casting,” where you 3D print a model out of resin, then pack it in plaster, and then once the plaster dries you melt out the resin and fill the void with molten– You know what? This is neat, but this actually isn’t what I wanted to tell you about.

But the description is pretty high-level: he says things like “ we’ll define three circles that we spin as we move down the parameterization of the curve,” which is a beautiful way to think about the effect he uses to create the braids in that video – but how do you actually do that? But I taught it how to concatenate real fancy-like; I added support for custom dynamic expressions so that you could write things like “rotate space around the y-axis by an angle that varies with the current y coordinate:” And finally my crowning achievement: custom dynamic lighting, with raymarched soft shadows, which you could specify on a shape-by-shape basis, and whose properties could vary over time and space to produce complex, interesting effects.

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