Nifty, but what I'm curious about is how you created the drain/fill effect on the cube.
Show HN: I was curious about spherical helix, ended up making this visualization
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Re: Show HN: I was curious about spherical helix, ended up making this visualization
#12I was wondering about the “correctness” of the z-axis movement for the spherical helix. You could pick lots of different functions, including simple linear motion (z = c * t). This would obviously affect the thickness and consistency of the “peels”.
The equation used creates a visually appealing result but I’m wondering what a good goal would be in terms of consistency in the distance between the spirals, or evenness in area divided, or something like that.
How was this particular function selected? Was it derived in some way or simply hand-selected to look pleasing?
Re: Show HN: I was curious about spherical helix, ended up making this visualization
#13Really nice animations! This is the type of thing that was really hard for me to grasp in school. This lays it out so plainly.
Re: Show HN: I was curious about spherical helix, ended up making this visualization
#14quite beautiful
Re: Show HN: I was curious about spherical helix, ended up making this visualization
#15This is very cool, but somewhat confusing to the eye, because you are actually demonstrating the movement of a point along a path, while visualising it with a cube whose orientation doesn't change when it feels like it should.
The point that is moving is in the centre of the cube. But the cube's orientation is fixed in global space.
So the cube's orientation relative to the path of the spiral/helix is not quite the same as its orientation relative to the path of the straight line.
Your mission, should you choose to accept it ;-)
Re: Show HN: I was curious about spherical helix, ended up making this visualization
#16Okay, I have some followup questions. Are the points equally spaced? I.e. the cube's |∆p| is constant? I see you scale z by the sin. What happens of you don't?
Re: Show HN: I was curious about spherical helix, ended up making this visualization
#17This is super nice to view, could you share how you made it? I want to make something similar for Rotation Matrices
I think 3blue1brown might have an animation library, the same one he uses in his videos that might help with that
He created a visualization library called Manim and it's great.
Re: Show HN: I was curious about spherical helix, ended up making this visualization
#18I LOVE when people geek out about the most simple mathematical things*, especially discovering the animation power of the trigonometric functions... or any of mathematics underlying modern interactive stuff. It's one thing to know what they do, it's another to understand the power of that tool.
* I wrote a similar article around making "blobs" a while back: https://www.hailpixel.com/articles/generative-art-simple-mat...
Re: Show HN: I was curious about spherical helix, ended up making this visualization
#19[dead]
Re: Show HN: I was curious about spherical helix, ended up making this visualization
#20I was expecting linear progression on z and some nasty square root for amplitude of x,y. It's cool that he basically just used another parametric circle drawn on coordinates z and amplitude of x,y oscillations.