“Every Combination of an Incomplete Cube +1 (after Sol Lewitt)” (Detail) by Matsys

Comment

Comment by Nick Tyrer on February 26, 2014 at 9:28am

Nice, simpler than i expected, but its the spacing/weighting of the image that elevates this, good composition. You could start selling your own 'geek' wrapping paper.

Comment by Andrew Kudless on February 26, 2014 at 8:42am

Thanks! I was looking at Sol Lewitt's version and wondered if he had drawn all of the variations. He limited the number of edges to 3 and excluded the complete 12-edge complete cube. He also seemed to exclude any combination where there are disconnected edges and (I think) combinations that would be identical if rotated. This left him with 122 variations. Without them I had 4095 combinations.

The method used started with projecting the wireframe of a cube on to a plane that is perpendicular to a vector going from one corner it's diagonal (eg from corner F to D). This produces the isometric projection. Next I used a python script found somewhere on the forum that iterates through a combination of values. It was only a 2 line script as Python has a library called itertools that has methods for this sort of thing. That gave me all of the different combos of indicies of the projected edges. Finally, I used Human the set-up the line weights for export.

Comment by Nick Tyrer on February 26, 2014 at 2:46am

Fantastic idea, looks like alien hieroglyphs. What was the methodology? and how many combinations were there?