Module 2 - Audrey Yan

Module 2 (3 units):

• Following the steps from the assignment was fairly straightforward, although there were a few places where I got stuck or just took my own approach.
• One of the first places I encountered some difficulties was actually just setting the endpoints of the cylinders — after I used the sine function to calibrate the heights of the cylinder, I was having trouble displacing the original grid by the height. I realized this was because I was trying to do this through the Point.byCoordinates function, which was generating a much larger grid because I was trying to cross product the original grid with the new z heights. I avoided the issue by simply using the translate geometry function.
• As is to be expected, the part of the assignment where everyone’s functions are the most different is the part where we set the cylinder heights — I actually used the MaximumItem function to scale the angle that I would feed into the sine function. This avoided any potential issues with having a distance in the denominator of any given function.
• For the 3 unit section where we reduced the height of the wave as points got farther from the pebble, I again used the same MaximumItem node — I liked this approach because it allowed me to decline the scale factor of the wave such that the farthest point from the pebble had a cylinder height of about zero (slightly greater than zero to avoid the cylinder function error feedback). I scaled the heights of the cylinders by (1-distance/(maxdistance+1)); by inspection, this retains the original height of the cylinder if the distance from the pebble is zero, and reduces the heights of the cylinder asymptotically to zero as the distance approaches the maximum distance. I had to do some back of the envelope pen and paper sketches/calcs to arrive at this formula since I am not the most tech savvy! But in the end this created this gentle decline in cylinder heights, as can be seen in the images above.