[HN Gopher] The Mary Queen of Scots Channel Anamorphosis: A 3D S...
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The Mary Queen of Scots Channel Anamorphosis: A 3D Simulation
Author : warrenm
Score : 70 points
Date : 2025-08-13 13:26 UTC (9 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.charlespetzold.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.charlespetzold.com)
| SiempreViernes wrote:
| Neat!
| dole wrote:
| Thought the name seemed familiar; he wrote a number of the early
| MS .NET 2000's era of C#, VB.Net and other Microsoft Press books.
| Warms the heart to see an industry mentor bang out goofy stuff
| for curiosity and fun.
| becurious wrote:
| He wrote Programming Windows 3.1 which was the classic
| reference for Windows programming in the 90s and just known as
| 'Petzold'. All Win16 and C. The managed languages are much
| later.
| onre wrote:
| For a moment I was really confused about this purported
| achievement of late Mary Stuart before my brain made the right
| connection.
| kitd wrote:
| _> The artist is unknown but the date of composition is given as
| 1580, which is several years before Mary was executed, so the
| transformation into a skull seems a little premature._
|
| Mary Queen of Scots was imprisoned by the English for about 19
| years before her execution and was pretty unpopular in Scotland
| during that period. So it is entirely possible that her morphing
| into a skull was intentional.
| rebuilder wrote:
| It seems hard to believe it was _not_ intentional!
| kitd wrote:
| Yes, wrong word. I meant it accurately reflected sentiment at
| the time.
| brookst wrote:
| Interesting and fun read, but I kept waiting for it to come back
| to logarithms. Seems there might be something there in the
| prisms?
| bee_rider wrote:
| Now that he's got it in a computer, it might be interesting to
| ask questions like: what's the geometry that has the sharpest
| transition, while also preserving some sort of "good view" of the
| two subjects from a lot of viewing angles. I think this is not
| even a good phrasing of the problem yet, but phrasing the problem
| well is part of the fun.
|
| I guess this could be interestingly image-dependent. In
| particular she's quite pale, so I wonder how many surfaces could
| be shared between the two images.
| triclops200 wrote:
| That'd be pretty easy to throw into an optimizer. For each
| configuration, you could calculate the "fitness" by just
| sampling the anamorphic rendering at various angles and do
| pixel by pixel comparisons to ground truth rendered single-
| image portraits of the two images rendered at the same angle.
| Could use nearly any metaheuristic super easy with that setup.
| nancyminusone wrote:
| Neat, it's like lenticular printing, but without the lens sheet
| alnwlsn wrote:
| I wondered how the original was made. Did they paint the whole
| thing at once and then pleat it? Or was it made of two paintings
| that were cut up?
|
| It seems to be much simpler than that; the prisms were solid and
| removable. So you just put them in a rack so all of one side is
| flat, and paint directly on them. When that painting is done, you
| rotate all the prisms to the next side and do the second
| painting.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tabula_scalata
| nathan_douglas wrote:
| The Brothers Quay did a fantastic (and predictably nightmarish)
| stop-motion exposition of anamorphosis:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cEfwbnMf3jM
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(page generated 2025-08-13 23:01 UTC)