Need Help!!!!!!!!!! how to do this?????

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Permalink Reply by Nik Willmore on October 19, 2015 at 5:33am

It's CNC carved Corian, a dense countertop plastic, so much of the finer ribs may be explained as being toolpaths, sharp ridges left behind after a ball mill cuts the bulk structural forms out, presumably after some sort of rough cutting you can no longer see.

But it's not standard CAM ("computer aided manufacturing") software toolpaths, since they are not parallel to each other, the fine little ribs that is, but sort of web between the bulk fabric like macrostructure. Nor are they of fixed width, but often quite wide, often tapered even from fat to skinny.

It's always possible that the entire big/small structure was fully 3D modeled then CNC cut very finely, so we are not really looking at efficient toolpaths at all in the fine structure, but actually CAD modeling, as if the whole thing was 3D printed. 3D printing would of course add its own layer-by-layer artifacts.

Here is the original artist's web site, based on a reverse Google image search:

http://www.danielwidrig.com/index.php?page=Work&id=CREAM

Ah, the artifacts (thick vs. thin tiny ridges) are likely explained by use of a spiral toolpath, which is fast and efficient, or either a circular toolpath, which would add artifacts between concentric circles, but you can see how a ball mill is making a micro-pattern here, over the CAD model of folded fabric, where I added red lines:

To achieve this as a 3D model, you would overlay by addition an undulated spiral of ridges on top of a folded fabric model, so just ignore the little ridges and worry about how to undulate a fabric like this, since the micro ridges are just decorative embellishment of the bulk structure.

One way, since I don't see any undercuts is to think in grayscale, in order to create a height map. Swirly stuff in Illustrator or Photoshop, or just 2D curves that then become filled in as stripes then blurred like crazy to make gradient transitions, then converted to a plaque to give it height field 3D structure.

The artist's Flickr has more detail that makes the little ridges look less regular, and more like webbing that conforms to the bulk structure:

https://www.flickr.com/photos/danielwidrig/

Again, so what? Getting the bulk structure is what matters.

I don't have an answer yet, but that's some initial impressions. Kangaroo (physics engine) can create fabric and let it fold about but I still think a 2D image strategy may work easier than trying to do physics (!).

There are Photoshop plugins that do chaotic swirling patterns, for instance, and I assume you know what a heightfield is, or can look it up. It's just the more white the higher you make it in Grasshopper, via some component. Native Rhino has that too.

Native Rhino also had the Drape command, in which you could merely create some 2D construction plane lines and raise them above a surface plane and 3D point edit them a bit to make the middle higher and the ends go down a bit, then drape a plane onto the combination and that would likely give some nice 3D "fabric" structure with the same sharp mountain peaks and smooth hills between them.

Permalink Reply by Nik Willmore on October 19, 2015 at 6:13am

I was wrong that the Rhino drape command would accept mere curves, but the patch command will:

Not very predictable, alas.

Permalink Reply by Nik Willmore on October 19, 2015 at 6:33am

So here indeed in Photoshop I made some arrows since my line tool was already set to add arrowheads, sorry, and blurred them to have soft gradient edges, then used the native Wave filter, not actually a plugin, to make them swirl about, and inverted the result:

Now if I import that into Grasshopper and make a heightfield from it, either NURBS or perhaps a mesh, I should get something akin to the structure you are focused on. I'm going to do it quick in ArtCAM instead, since that will give the same result with no confused node search for the right tricks in Grasshopper:

Permalink Reply by dude on November 13, 2015 at 3:19pm

It looks like it was generated using some kind of turbulence, it looks like smoke. I've played with making wrinkles in Kangaroo, but they don't look like that. The artist, Daniel,  is fantastic, I like his other stuff.