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Drawing Machines

by yonilevy on 11/9/20, 11:49 AM with 14 comments

• by app4soft on 11/9/20, 4:34 PM

  It reminds me "PWA"[0] concept art by Stefán Zsolt[1] created using Blender 2.4x, which was published in the "Blenderart" Issue 1 (2005/11/15).[2,3]

  [0] http://blender3d.org.ua/book/BlenderArt1/img/g3.jpg

  [1] https://developer.blender.org/p/zsoltst/

  [2] http://web.archive.org/web/20060329091150/http://www.blender...

  [3] http://web.archive.org/web/20070927020908/http://www.blender...

• by bjackson2718 on 11/9/20, 5:51 PM

  James Nolan Gandy (https://www.instagram.com/gandyworks) does excellent work like this.

• by regularfry on 11/9/20, 6:53 PM

  I got vaguely fascinated by the documentary Tim's Vermeer a few years back, where Tim Jennison makes the argument that Vermeer used something not unlike a couple of these to project his scenes onto a canvas so he could effectively paint-by-numbers. Whether that's true or not, I found the idea fascinating, I just don't have a good enough understanding of optics to understand how the system of lenses and mirrors works to be able to know how to replicate it.

• by abeppu on 11/9/20, 4:31 PM

  https://drawingmachines.org/post.php?id=148

  It's kinda weird that the understanding of the word "spectrograph" seems to have changed a lot in not that long a time. My understanding is that work on observing the spectra of stars and understanding their composition went on in the 1920s. Not only did the 'spectro-' part acquire a relatively specific meaning, but it seems like the term flipped from naming a device to an image produced by a device in not that long a period.

• by tikej on 11/9/20, 11:24 PM

  The drawings of the machines are art by themselves.

  One thing I miss about plotting libraries is having the ability to draw this kind of "pencil drawn" plots as in old technical books.

• by phkahler on 11/10/20, 12:44 AM

  Making a pen plotter:

  https://www.thingiverse.com/thing:3340918

• by carapace on 11/9/20, 8:22 PM

  I didn't see mentioned the planimeter: "A planimeter, also known as a platometer, is a measuring instrument used to determine the area of an arbitrary two-dimensional shape." ~ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Planimeter