kirby urner wrote: > > SO: Any recommendations as to course textbooks? Or just go with > Zelle > and/or O'Reilly's latest wood rat book? > - The students presumably have had programming courses already. > - I would think that K-12 students would be happier if they could > generate some graphics. > - This is a 6-weeks course. Little leisure time. > > Appreciate any advice. > > Peter Chase > Sul Ross State University > > > I still like Zelle's best and includes some graphics (Tk-based, using > his own graphics.py). > > Some of the online tutorials are quite worthwhile as well: > http://diveintopython.org/ is freely downloadable. > > Or roll your own (that's what I've been doing). > > Another way to get graphics is to write scene description language > (POV-Ray) or even VRML from Python. I've used this approach > successfully, but only because I give students access to prewritten > modules. Like, we might build our own vector class, with a module > that already expects to use vectors. > > VPython is still more graphically exciting.
My fun this week in some sense involved some synthesis of these approaches - having come to a "what is possible" revelation. PyGeo uses VPython for vector graphics, and exports to POV-Ray - producing a high quality "still" of what one is observing on the screen. Except that I hadn't been able to find a way to reliably reproduce a representation of a flat plane in POV-Ray that closely resembled the PyGeo plane - which is just a mesh of thin lines (the vpytbon curve object)- exported to POV-Ray the lines showed too much of their thickness, and the illusion of flatness, essential to a plane was lost. I realized what *does* work is a image map of a line mesh - with appropriate transparencies - applied to a flat polygon, scaled and oriented appropriately in POV-Ray. But PyGeo allows one to apply any color to a plane. I would lose that in POV-Ray if I used a particular image map, or even some collection of them. Ah-ha. I now have PIL creating a the image map - transparencies and all - on the fly. One can have an unlimited number of plane objects represented in an unlimited number of colors created in POV_Ray, pretty reliably representing what one is seeing in the on screen rendering. There is about 10 lines of easy to follow code involved. Too much fun. Art _______________________________________________ Edu-sig mailing list Edu-sig@python.org http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/edu-sig
