Hexatree

The new GH plugin Starfish brings a wealth of interesting pattern possibilities to the table. One of them I used here as basis for the shortest walk node to create semi-natural forms.
I then exported as EMF to Affinity Designer Beta for Windows and did the variable line thickness etc. there.
AD handles these relatively heavy files really well, much better than Illustrator CS6 - highly recommended to try it out.
More results here (some of them I posted here before):
http://www.screendream.de/design/life-love/

Cheers,

Tom

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Comment by Thomas Helzle on August 17, 2016 at 6:22am: Hehehe - mission accomplished then... ;-)

I'd love to have it as a real sculpture.

Cheers,

Tom

Comment by martyn hogg on August 17, 2016 at 6:13am: Ah, well it's good! I thought you'd actually made it and was wondering how!

Comment by Thomas Helzle on August 17, 2016 at 3:47am: Hey Martyn,

that is an older model I created from a twisted torus. What you see is basically only one third of the whole, which turned out to be more interesting than the complete torus. IIRC I created it manually in TopMod with crust-modelling, then exported it to Softimage XSI for Subdivision Surface conversion and edge weighting. Originally I rendered it in Fryrender back in the day.

This specific render was a test in Modo 601 though. I didn't gel with the application in the end, but found this rendering interesting. The object is almost impossible to UV-map well, so it's using a cubic projection which in this case somehow works, since a real wood block would probably also be glued together in a similar way and show such jumps in texture (I once started as a cabinet maker ;-) ).

I once coded a volumetric wood shader for messiah:studio which worked very well on such unmappable topologies, since it was able to show correct directional grain and year-rings like the real thing - something pretty much impossible to do with mappings. It even had procedural branch knots... I no longer use the application, but the shader would be great for such sculptural works.

The texture looks rather weird on it's own, IIRC it's some kind of gritty floor panel.

Cheers,

Tom

Comment by martyn hogg on August 17, 2016 at 3:24am: How did you make the Torriander? Looks like burr walnut?

Comment by Thomas Helzle on August 17, 2016 at 3:10am: Thanks Nick!

That sphere is also based on a Starfish pattern - that component is a great inspiration for me.

My next bigger goal is to find a solution for a kind of guided shortest walk so that paths tend towards certain goals or along splines.

I re-coded all of my website this year in a CMS called "Get Simple CMS" which is really nice to work with.

It's a clean-slate CMS that doesn't use a database but stores everything in XML files, templates are simply HTML files with some placeholders for the content. Very fast and lightweight.

Together with Komodo Edit and the live.js script, it provides for a very fluid and WYSIWYG workflow.

Comment by Nick Tyrer on August 17, 2016 at 2:52am: Yes nice website, especially like the spiralling wire sphere!

Comment by Thomas Helzle on August 16, 2016 at 1:39pm: Thanks Martyn!

Comment by martyn hogg on August 16, 2016 at 12:12pm: Great work, really enjoyed your website too!

Comment by Thomas Helzle on August 16, 2016 at 3:19am: Check this thread, it has many examples in 2D and 3D:

http://www.grasshopper3d.com/forum/topics/shortest-walk-tapered-bra...

Basically you create some kind of grid and connect that to the shortest walk components upper input (as the grid it searches for paths on), then in a case like the above you create lines from the centre point to all other points in the grid and connect those to the lower input of the shortest walk node (as the paths you want to travel). The node then returns the shortest paths on the grid for each of those lines.

So in the case of the above, there is one line for each endpoint, that's why the result will become rather heavy quickly.

Comment by Adam on August 16, 2016 at 1:04am: Hi Thomas Helzle ,I am trying to do some effects similar to yours,could you give me some advice about how to make the path of the tree,many thanks.