Wednesday, January 10, 2007

musings on generating necklaces

What would it take to write a 'proper' necklace generator in SL?

The script that produced the weird Lissajous object (which Natalia has dubbed the Crazy Prim Thingie) was originally a test case for necklace generation. I never got around to making any further progress, and Johanna Hyacinth has already made huge progress in doing many if not all of the things it takes to have necklaces generated. But if I were to return to this puzzle...

Some musings:
  • the path a necklace takes
    • behind the neck, it could ride high, or dip down a bit
    • depending on how far down it went in back, the path over the shoulders would either need to come UP and then down, or just go straight down
    • in front, there can be a huge range of how far down you might want it to dip
    • if there was a object in front, it should drag the necklace down to form more of a point; if not, the front should be rounded
    • how far outwards the necklace would go, side-to-side, I suppose would be defined by the width of the necklace wearer's neck
  • the composition of a necklace
    • simplest would be a repeating object, like a string of beads
    • an alternating set of objects, like alternating links and objects
    • an arbitrary set or list of items, which may or may not be the same size
  • rotation of the items along the necklace path
    • flat objects should lie against the skin
    • links would rotate, usually 90 degrees with each link
    • rounder objects might be randomly rotated
  • spacing of the objects
    • generally, you would want them to 'just touch', end-to-end
    • the weird Lissajous object was my experiment to make sure that this was doable with an arbitrary 3D-path.
    • this is where computation efficiency would count; doing it in LSL could be rather slow. For the Lissajous object, I did the computation outside of SL. But, I still think it'd be preferable to be able to generate the necklace entirely in SL
And somehow, I think there are probably other factors that I haven't even considered yet...

Altogether, sounds rather challenging. And, I've seen enough people with necklaces floating a bit off the shoulders, or disappearing into the neck, that I wonder whether people in general would even care about having a properly fitted necklace.