Everything's a graph

date: October 12, 2022

Dog skulls are graphs.

Thanks to the RISD Nature Lab for their 3D scans of animal skulls , specifically their scan of a dog skull. With nearly 250K vertices, the dog skull mesh is too fine for nx3d given current limitations .

With this in mind, first I decimated the mesh down to 2000 faces using the libigl package: v, f = igl.qslim(v, f, 2000). To visualize the decimated mesh, I created the following javascript applet using the meshplot package: mp.offline(); mp.plot(v, f); mp.save('my_applet.hmtl'). This lower-res mesh has a tractable 808 vertices, so now it's time to show that the dog skull is a graph by running diffusion and playing the Game of Life on it. The nodes of the graph are made up of the vertices of the mesh.