While I could make today’s post long, I decided to keep it short, because I wanted the images to speak for themselves.
In my last post I already introduced the concept of orthogonal refraction and showed an image that showed all sorts of elements involved with the concept. However, in today’s post I show you a proverbial spherical cow:
The above image is a simplification of the concept of orthogonal refraction to the minimal number of elements. If viewed from an angle, one can see elements that aren’t visible in this two-dimensional representation.
The longer red line along the red cube depicts the cross product of the yellow line and the green line (also along the cube), drawn from the center of the green line. The shorter red line depicts the cross product of the longer red line with the green line, still along the red cube, multiplied with the sine of 30° plus the angle of refraction (if I recall correctly).
This makes the blue line the sum of the red lines minus half of the green line.
And if I’m correct, with these simple rules I should apply the same rule to draw the line after the blue line. And the line after that. And after that, until the lines go around and determine the yellow and green lines.
I’m not 100 % sure whether I’m right, but this should be pretty easy to test. One option is that I’m almost right, but that these rules just produce a helix of vectors that doesn’t bend into a closed loop.
I’ll soon let you know how close to the truth I was.
Comments