Centroidal Voronoi Sun

Just a little image I wanted to show you that depicts Konstrukt’s ability to creating centroidal Voronoi tesselations (CVT). The iteration count on this particular object was very low. More iterations converge to a very stable and homogoenous distribution.

VIDEO 01: A simple example using a mesh cube attached to a NURBS plane. Some basic transformations are shown.[See post to watch Flash video]

VIDEO 02: A star-shaped NURBS curve attached to a NURBS sphere via the GD. Simultaneously the curve is being used as a trim curve. One could argue that you could do that with a projected curve but the only way this can be tranformed is translation. The GD allows for every transform (tanslate, (soft) rotate, (soft) scale) on attached objects.[See post to watch Flash video]

VIDEO 03: This video depicts the transform features especially the soft rotate and soft scale features of the Geometry Deformer using an extruded mesh. The mesh structure was created with Konstrukt’s Voronoi module.[See post to watch Flash video] ]]> http://blog.ticket01.com/2009/04/23/konstrukt-geometry-deformer/feed/ http://blog.ticket01.com/2009/04/17/here-comes-the-sun/ http://blog.ticket01.com/2009/04/17/here-comes-the-sun/#comments Fri, 17 Apr 2009 09:08:47 +0000 ticket01 http://blog.ticket01.com/?p=93

Voronoi Sun

Looks like things are going pretty smoothly with Konstrukt. Testing the Geometry Deformer, a Maya deformer that will allow you to constrain geometric surfaces to NURBS surfaces, is nearly finished.

The image was created using the Voronoi module. Its output, a polygonal mesh, has then been applied to a NURBS sphere and deformed using the Geometry Deformer. With the help of LiveWire, some nice materials and Maxwell Render it got its finish.

Konstrukt will also feature an advanced version of the LiveWire node, supporting texture-driven insets which can be applied per-face or per-vertex.

But back to the topic: creating astonishing and complex cellular surfaces has always been a challenging task. A keyword for cellular structures is Voronoi. The mathematical definition comes here: Given a set of points S called sites, in general, the set of all points closer to a point c of S than to any other point of S is the interior of a Voronoi cell for c. Since a lot of you are on the constant lookout and search for new shapes I’d guess that you’ve already stumbled upon structures like the one pictured above. The example uses only a few cells but even at the current stage of development the Voronoi node is already able to compute about 20.000 cells/second in real-time. So don’t aim for the little target. The case pictured above is the 2D version of the Voronoi node. In fact Voronoi cells exist in any dimension, so going for 3D will be the next step.

The plug-in will allow for the creation of Voronoi surfaces from a variety of inputs like mesh vertices, particles or locators. Geometry output options will include polygonal meshes, NURBS surfaces and NURBS curves.

Creating the array is pretty easy. Create a new box object, scale it down a little and for the looks apply two different shaders to each side. Duplicate this card like 9 times in X direction and the resulting 10 objects again 9 times in Y direction.

Select the cards and run RampRotate.

If everything went fine you should now have 100 cards attached to 100 ramps and one called masterRamp. All ramps get their info from this master ramp. Animating the masterRamp drives all others as well. The rotation around Z is attached to the red value of the ramp. The higher the red the bigger the rotation.

If you want the rotation to be different than Z just edit the script at the location before the ROTATION AXIS comment.

… was possibly the most striking headline I could think of when it came to this:

As you already know SmartDuplicate includes a powerful tool called Generize. It was born in June 2007 when a member of the Maya forum percutio asked for a very special tool that would allow for the distribution of objects on other objects. Since at that time there was no way to do things like this in Maya the Generize module was born.

Now, that a year has gone by, things have developed exceptionally well, SmartDuplicate has been picked up by architects and was even the fundamental base for a workshop I held at the Technical University Braunschweig in April/May 2008.

The last and most exciting step was to transform what once was just virtual into something real. This step was entirely done by alphacam using their RP machines.

Beginning July, 18th 2008 you have the great chance to see these models in an exhibition in Berlin, Germany. The Architektur Galerie Berlin is going to show real-smartDuplicate models in the Mediationen exhibition until August, 16th 2008.

If you’re interested in this, don’t miss it!