Large Assignment 5: Tiling – Ryan Cruz

Part 1: 2D Tiles

Part A

For part A there were really no issues. I just made y-axis a function that grew larger each oscillation and the x-axis a function that shrunk each oscillation. This resulted in the following tile and tiling.

Part B

For part B, it was the complete opposite. I knew I wanted to do a triangle tiling since I had a slight idea on how to start it. I knew I had to rotate it somehow but I just couldn’t find the right way to do it which lead to a lot of trial and error. The rotation itself was fine but making it repeat over multiple rows and columns lead to a lot of issues. Sometimes I had a triangle that was in the middle of nowhere. Once I figured out how to make the proper lattice structure, I had another issue. The tiling itself led to a lot of problems as when I’d color it in although I had thought it was closed off completely it would turn out that I had a ton of holes. This is again led to a bunch of trial and error involving changing certain conditionals until I finally got it. (This took forever! If anyone did it fast please let me know I’d love to see how you did it!)

Part 2: 3D Printed 3D Tiles

For the 3D Printed 3D Tiles, I wanted to make something that represented something occurring in nature. I stumbled across this picture of a diving bird and thought it’d work well. So, I traced the image and made it work for the tiling process as best I could! Other than finding something that interested me, the coding process wasn’t too bad. I had some trouble with the extruding and offset processes but I figured it out in the end by using the bounding box to get a center point. Although my z movement isn’t too complex, I felt like it complimented the fast nature of a diving bird when it dives into the water. The printing process wasn’t terrible either. I had one issue with my prints not sticking to the bed, but I just used glue and that fixed it.

Part 3: Surface Morph

At first I wanted to use my triangle tiling, but this had a lot of challenges that I just couldn’t figure out. Then, I wanted to use one of my vessels from large assignment 2. However, I ran into even more issues with this as the object would have an extremely distorted surface morph that looked nothing like the tiling. Therefore, I stuck with my tiling from part 2 and created my own surface with a python block. I decided to go with a tornado-like surface as I thought it’d look cool to have the birds spiraling around a vortex and I was right. The wings of the birds actually led to a nice birds eye view ( 🙂 ) of the object too! Enjoy the images!

Code

8 thoughts on “Large Assignment 5: Tiling – Ryan Cruz

  1. Hey Ryan,

    Your surface morph turned out so well! I love that it actually looks like the birds are flying down the funnel in a spiral like motion! I also had trouble initially finding a surface to morph my tiling onto, so I’m glad you found something that looks so good.

    I also think the 3D aspect of your printed tiles works really well, because it lends to the appearance of the bird diving.

    1. Thanks for the comment and kind words Nathaniel! I had a lot of fun with this assignment when I wasn’t doing trial and error stuff.

      I’m glad you enjoyed the z axis movement of my 3D shapes. Although simple it did take a while to figure out the correct way to move it without causing a lot of distortion to the original shape.

  2. Hi Ryan,
    I feel your pain during the creation of the triangular lattice. I had the same idea of rotating the triangles and you can get lost on where things are going. Trials and error was the solution for me as well, since I would get weirds errors. So I had to keep referring to the slides in order to get some sort of a solution. Surface morph reminds me of a dark hole and the color scheme definitely fits it. Awesome designs!

    1. Thanks Ricardo! I love this color scheme a lot. I always use it whenever I can and even though I do try out different ones this has by far been my favorite.

      Perhaps I should’ve referred to the slides when I was trying to fix my tiling. My problem was just with my conditionals not covering every possibility. At one point I got completely lost in it with if statements everywhere so I restarted and made it a lot cleaner. Part of my problems came from doing this with little sleep at 3 am so that didn’t help much either.

      I’m glad we were both able to figure out our tiles!

  3. Hi Ryan,
    It seems everyone who created the triangular struggled a bit and approached it a bit differently. I really like the way your coloring pattern came out for the triangular tiling, Im glad you figured it out! As for your 3d print, that came out great! I really enjoy your shape you choice, and I agree that the z offset add the the speed the bird has diving. Again really great job with everything :).

    1. Hey Andrea,

      I’m actually fascinated by your description of how you did your triangular tiling. I tried messing with the vectors first as that was my initial idea but for some reason I just couldn’t figure out why my tiles weren’t closing. I’d like to hear how you figured it out someday or look at your code, it’s impressive!

      Thanks for the comment and kind words. I’m glad that others are liking the z offset.

  4. Ryan,
    Once again incredible job on these prints. I really like how you took inspiration from the bird diving and turned it into a successful pattern. Did you have any other 3D ideas prior to the slanted extrusion? It was a really simple concept but definitely think simpler was better in this execution. Again, great prints and awesome post, cant wait to see what you create next.
    Justin

    1. Hey Justin,

      Thank you! I was struggling with finding what to do for my 3D print as I wanted it to represent something in nature but I wasn’t sure what. I saw other people do reptiles and fish and thought it was so cool but had no idea about what I’d do. I was watching some random YouTube video and saw the image of the bird diving. I knew I wanted to do it cause of the beautiful symmetry of the bird. Although it was simple it meant a lot to me so I enjoyed it more than other projects.

      I actually did have other ideas for the z movement. For example, I was thinking of doing a wave-like movement across the shape to simulate the water distortion as the bird would dive into it. I couldn’t figure it out though. I’m thinking of asking Leah for any advice on how to create that. I did also see someone do something similar so I may download their files and see how they perfected it.

      Again, thanks for the comment!

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