Jorge Loredo Large Assignment 3 – Tiling

Esher tessellation

With this part I had a lot of fun, figuring out a simple yet nice way to create a cool tessellation with turtle geometry was tricky but I ended up going with a couple of nested for loops that solved it for me.

The way it works is that I have a function called Tessellate and it is called in a for loop that draws the tile vertically until it fills up the screen, this for loop is nested in another for loop that repositions the turtle in order to tessellate horizontally.

With this solution I was able to design a nice, simple Iron Man helmet that would tessellate the screen appropriately:

The processing code for creating the following tessellation can be found in this post.

Because I really like Tessellations and Esher, in fact I wrote about him in my first post for this class. I really wanted to create a cool tessellation that resembled his work but with my own touch. This turned out to be really hard with processing and turtle geometry specially due to the time constraints, so I decided to do one with illustrator since I can personally achieve this faster with illustrator. The illustrator file will be include in this post as well. Here is the resulting tessellation!

I chose to do Monkeys because I am a rock climber and everyone always tells me I’m like a monkey, so it is my favorite animal besides dogs of course.

Tiling

For my first couple of tiling patterns I stuck to the code we learned in class and only messed with tiling it to different planes, so I was really only changing the plane itself on the python script.

Here is the first simple tiling of a plane:

After this I messed with my plane to create a crazy shape that seemed something like a spaceship and this was the result that I liked the most:

Finally I moved on to creating my own tile and then importing it to rhino in order to use the grasshopper code to tile, I assigned my geometric shape, created a solid from it and connected it to the tile input from the python script. From there I started to notice some problems. My tile is an alteration of a triangle, I used the tool that Leah showed in class in order to find a complex alteration of a triangle that tiles. The thing is that although it is a triangle it doesn’t necessarily tile like a triangle, in my first attempt I realized that the tile was mirroring in the wrong axis thus making a mess with each iteration since with this tile the shape is rotated in different ways for the horizontal pattern and the vertical pattern and it changes with every two iterations vertically, here is an image of what was popping up:

Thus, by changing the code for the positioning of the tiles I was able to fix some of it but not all, this is an image of the closest attempt before I accidentally crashed my program and decided to give up since I was out of time to complete this assignment.

I wasn’t able to create something that I could 3D print for this part of the assignment and I feel like the main mistake was probably spending too much time on my tessellation for the Esher part.

Here is the zip for my files: