teaching machines

Chain

June 10, 2021 by Chris Johnson. Filed under public, slai-2021.

This post is part of a course on geometric modeling at the Summer Liberal Arts Institute for Computer Science held at Carleton College in 2021.

With these next few exercises, you are given only an image of a target shape and function specification. It’s up to you to deduce what boolean operations are happening to produce the shape. Here’s your first challenge, which we’ll call a chain for lack of a more specific term:

Create your shape in a function named generateChain. Have it accept these parameters:

• An integer nlatitudes that specifies the number of lines of latitude that each torus has.
• An integer nlongitudes that specifies the number of lines of longitude that each torus has.
• The majorRadius of each torus.
• The minorRadius of each torus.

Use boolean operations to weld together the three torii. Rendering three separate torii is cheating.