Dan Harkless' "After The Bomb"

Date:  

February 9, 1994

Tool:  

Advanced Visual Systems AVS visualization package on a Digital Equipment Corporation DECstation running ULTRIX 4.x

Info:  

At UCI, I took a Computer Graphics course, but it wasn't anywhere near as cool as you might imagine. It was very theoretical and didn't cover animation, morphing, or anything fun. Our only lab assignment was to learn how to use this obscure visualization package called AVS. You would construct these rendering networks by connecting various different calculation modules with a GUI. Next you would feed in data which was generated by a separate FORTRAN program, and a 3-D visualization would result.

We were supposed to be modeling a magnetic field or something, but when I fed the data into my network with some coefficients set wrong, I got the neat set of vectors you see here. It looked like some kind of installation had shot out a bunch of ground-to-air missiles but had been successfully bombed nonetheless. Adding the dodecahedron fireball and the escaping jet completed the scene. Working in 3-D, by the way, really multiplies the tweaking opportunities for people like myself who can be prone to perfectionism. I spent an embarassing amount of time getting the placement and rotation of the jet and light sources just right.

One question: Why does the jet have its landing gear down on a bombing run? Answer: Sorry, that's the only jet model AVS provided.

Oh, I guess I should acknowledge that I nipped the title of this picture from the post-apocalyptic Role Playing Game of the same name. Except in this case, it literally means: after that one bomb. That we just dropped.