Is it possible to “model” in a dimension past the third? All I'd really like is the 4th, and anything past that would be nice.
Some way you could put in an expression to a box and turn it into a hypercube or tesseract, and then you could choose how to project it.

How would you propose to represent this? In the same way that you can only represent 3D in a 2D world as either a cross section or more commonly a faked perspective(which has all sorts of history and rules behind it so we all instantly recognize it), you need to have a method of showing this so it makes sense, forget about actually modeling structures in it that truly *work* in 4 dimensions.

There's a bunch of work out there that's been done around 4 dimensional polyhedra and while it's very interesting stuff mathematically, it's far from intuitive.

Cheers,

J.C.

I know I couldn't actually make something. I'd just like it to make an image of a cross section of some simple 4D geometry.

Wikipedia [en.wikipedia.org], as usual, has some interesting info. There's nothing intrinsic to Houdini that would give you any shortcuts to dealing with this, except of course it's a very flexible system so I suppose you could implement your own representations. Some cross-sectional polyhedra will use colour as a guide to the 4th axis, of course you could do something with that. In the end, though, it tends to be a tricky thing to build, graphically, that makes much sense to the average eye for obvious reasons. You can build a Klein bottle, but it's not a true Klein bottle, natch.

Cheers,

J.C.

JColdrick
Wikipedia [en.wikipedia.org], as usual, has some interesting info.

While Wikipedia has some good info, I'd suggest just asking John Bigboote. He's an expert.

Looking at stuff on Wikipedia is what got me interested in trying to represent it.

Who's John Bigboote? Hope I'm not falling for some joke.

oh Jim….
you and your Buckaroo Banzai references…

Too late: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0086856/ [imdb.com]

heydabop
Looking at stuff on Wikipedia is what got me interested in trying to represent it.

Who's John Bigboote? Hope I'm not falling for some joke.

probbins
Too late: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0086856/ [imdb.com]

heydabop
Looking at stuff on Wikipedia is what got me interested in trying to represent it.

Who's John Bigboote? Hope I'm not falling for some joke.

Ouch…..
I searched Google, and that came up, but I figured it wasn't it.

While it wouldn't be a real-time view of the 4th dimension (you'd have to be a tralfamadorian to do that), you could use the time shift and copy sops cleverly to create a sort of time sculpture of something animated. The effect would be similar to winning in solitaire.

…or losing in poker?

J.C.

I think he meant winning on Windows OS's, when the cards all go flying everywhere.

I guess you have more patience when losing at poker than JColdrick :wink:

Maybe I do…..

However, I never got how it was like winning solitaire in the first place.

Here's someone who apparently stopped playing/winning solitaire at some stage:
http://www.dimensions-math.org/Dim_E.htm [dimensions-math.org]

Link via Andz(odforce)

Neat site!

J.C.

Cool. I think I might have to watch that whole thing.