Making "The Optiverse"

Making "The Optiverse":

A Mathematician's Guide to `AVN`,
a Real-Time Interactive Computer Animator

by George K. Francis, Stuart Levy & John M. Sullivan

To appear in Matematics, Art, Technology, Cinema, edited by M. Emmer and M. Manaresi, Springer, 2002;
and in Italian translation as "The Optiverse: una guida ai matematici per AVN, programma interattivo di animazione" in Matematica, arte, tecnologia, cinema.

PDF file (1458 kB, with figures)
TeX source in Springer style (38 kB)
Gzipped tar file with all figures (2600 kB)

Plain-English Abstract

Our 1998 video The Optiverse illustrates an optimal sphere eversion, computed automatically by minimizing an elastic bending energy for surfaces. This paper describes avn, the custom software program we wrote to explore the computed eversion. Various special features allowed us to use avn also to produce our video: it controlled the camera path throughout and even rendered most of the frames.