Of all the ways to manipulate a 3D mesh, the “push/pull” technique popularized by SketchUp (http://www.sketchup.com/) is one of the most approachable and fun. PushPull++ is a recent paper that elaborates on the technique, cleaning up a lot of edge cases and unlocking new features, using wonderfully straightforward math. The potential for 3D modeling tools or procedural mesh generation APIs built on these simple ideas is very exciting.
The paper presents the technique and the tool that the authors built. I will focus on the technique, as that’s the part I loved more in this paper.
Ramsey Nasser (@ra (https://twitter.com/ra)) is a computer scientist, game designer, and educator based in Brooklyn. He researches programming languages by building tools to make computation more expressive and implementing projects that question the basic assumptions we make about code itself. His games playfully push people out of their comfort zones, and are often written in experimental programming languages of his design. A former Eyebeam (http://eyebeam.org/) fellow and a member of Kitchen Table Coders (https://twitter.com/ktcoders), when he is not reasoning about abstract unintuitive machines, he builds and maintains vintage motorcycles.
