Wikipedia:Featured picture candidates/NURBS surface

NURBS surface animation

Original - Three-dimensional NURBS surfaces can have complex, organic shapes. Control points influence the directions the NURBS surface takes. The outermost square below delineates the X/Y extents of the surface.

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Revised (again after Noodle snacks)- NURBS surfaces are a method for easily creating complex, aesthetic, or technical shapes in 3D computer graphics. With NURBS, a minimal number of control points (the small spheres) on each path (lines) influence the directions for very smooth, organic surfaces to follow.

Reason

I think it is captivating, reflects well upon Wikipedia, and highlights the virtues of an electronic encyclopedia. I believe it meets the eight criteria for a featured picture. The 1000-pixel minimum doesn’t apply to an animation. The native, 400-pixel width used for the animation is one of the standards for Theora animations (there are two of those in the same article this is in) and I used every trick in the book (like 6-bit depth—not eight, 20 fps, and frame optimization) to keep the file size reasonable.

By the way, if you are using Safari (which has a goofy way of handling animated GIFs) and the animation isn’t playing smoothly for you, try pretty much any other browser, such as Firefox.

Articles in which this image appears

NURBS and Cobalt (CAD program)

Creator

Greg L

• Support as nominator --Greg L (talk) 00:21, 1 April 2010 (UTC)
• Support Fnagaton 05:19, 1 April 2010 (UTC)
• support extremely well done.©Geni 15:32, 2 April 2010 (UTC)
• Support Such a nice animation would look fantastic as a featured picture. Kudos, Greg L. SteveB67 (talk) 18:36, 2 April 2010 (UTC)
• Support. Very well done. It isn't immediately obvious what it's showing though, and relies fairly heavily on the articles to explain it. But that's the nature of the subject, and not the fault of the image. Ðiliff «» (Talk) 08:18, 5 April 2010 (UTC)

• Good point, Diliff. I didn’t think the caption through. What I originally had was a close approximation of the caption as it appears in the NURBS article. What I should be showing here is the proposed caption for this animation as a Featured Picture on the Main Page, which receives a more general-interest readership. I’ve accordingly added a revised caption. Greg L (talk) 17:04, 5 April 2010 (UTC)

• What does the grid and the square/diamonds (depending on the angle) represent (info in the caption please)? Noodle snacks (talk) 04:12, 8 April 2010 (UTC)

• You too; good point. Addressed now. Greg L (talk) 04:35, 8 April 2010 (UTC)

Promoted File:NURBS 3-D surface.gif —Maedin\^talk 21:26, 9 April 2010 (UTC)