3D Bubbles: The Boom
Context:
A side project for my B IMD 362 class revolved around revolving 3D structures. I was assigned to create a 3D work of art that rotated correctly within a simulated space. The restrictions were to use only shapes and colors: no textures, pictures, or sound.
Reflection:
I started off with the goal of having something aesthetically pleasing: I often turn to mathematical patterns when I do this. This lead to me having the pattern of each "point", made up of two or more circles in a line relative to the center node, be oriented to stick out in one of the 3 Dimensional Octants. (Octants like the two dimensional quadrants, +x,+y; -x,+y; +x,-y; -x,-y; but with the factor of a third dimension, +-z).
This gave me 8 points relative to the center, which was pretty satisfying. Then I thought of adding more points, but with two of the three axis values equaling zero. This gave me six more points. I multiplied the distance from the center by a rough estimation of the square root of 2, and it became the model in the video, minus the colors.
I learned a lot about generating 3D shapes in a 3D environment from this project, along with manipulation of nodes. If I did this again, I would try experimenting with different shapes: when working on this, I struggled with rotating different objects to how I wanted them to be.
Developing the Application
 (I've commented out some of the code to simulate previous drafts) The code started off with one "point", where a for loop generated one sphere, and then another sphere further from the original. |  This is where I made a point for each of the 3D octants, so a point for +x,+y,+z all the way to -x,-y,-z. This was a mathematic aesthetic choice, and came through well. |
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 This was a grayscale idea of the 3D Bubbles: now with 14 different "points"! |  I decided that a grayscale would be to obscure for this now, so I made polar opposite points be of the same color. The colors were also saturated and bright to contrast with the white center and the black background. |