On Aug 6, 2004, at 5:43 PM, Rich wrote:

> Find the chord, then find the triangle. [etc]

BTW, this is the sort of thing that led me to understand that I was NOT
particularly cut out for a career in computer graphics.  It was 1977 or
so, and I was in the "intro to graphics" class (a 1st year grad student
class, open to undergrads, since it WAS "intro.")  The prof's "thing"
was modeling the human body.  We had assorted guest speakers, one of
whom was doing a competing body model based on a set of ellipsoids (our
prof was using spheres. "Bubbleman"...)  It was cool; there were
several dozen ellipsoids used to make up a body.

Then he started talking about the way they were optimizing the
equations to find the interections of ellipsoids, so you could tell
whether the arms were trying to move through each other or not...
Ouch!  (This was back when a reasonably fast computer was a couple
MIPs, and that wasn't something that fit on your desk...)

BillW

--
http://www.piclist.com hint: The PICList is archived three different
ways.  See http://www.piclist.com/#archives for details.