Two Geometric Sculptures with Distant Ontogenies
Year: 2003 Authors: Benjamin Wells
Core claim
Simple geometric constructions and color constraints can produce visually compelling sculptures across digital modeling and paper craft.
Topics
geometric sculpture, 3D printing, paper construction, coloring constraints
Domains
geometry, topology, graph coloring, digital art, paper craft, sculpture, visual design
Methods
Maya modeling, NURBS surfaces, rotation and scaling, pie-coloring
Media
NURBS surfaces, paper octahedron, flag disk, 3D print
Paper text
The text below is the locally extracted OCR/Markdown version of the paper. Raw PDF files remain local and are not published here.
ISAMA The International Society of the Arts, Mathematics, and Architecture BRIDGES Mathematical Connections in Art, Music, and Science
Two Geometric Sculptures with Distant Ontogenies
Benjamin Wells Mathematics, Computer Science University of San Francisco 2130 Fulton Street San Francisco CA 94117 USA Email: Wells@usfca.edu
1. Caging the Wild Snurb.
This piece was constructed in Maya from three NURBS surfaces (two intersecting tori and a sphere) by rotation and scaling operations on the surfaces and subsets of their control vertices. It took about ten minutes at the Siggraph 2002 Studio while I was waiting for confirmation of my place in a 3D printing queue. The goal was to see if I could create something interesting for a later queue that would not advertise my novice acquaintance with Maya. The result fetched a number of kind comments that might not have been so generous if the development time were known to be so trivial. The plan is to present two new 3D prints as well as 2D projections.
2. The AMBoctahedron.
Arabic script spelling “Meher Baba” wraps around a paper octahedron, which is suspended above a flag disk. The disk is a pie-coloring in which no two similarly colored regions share even a vertex. The colors in each concentric ring reflect the satranga seven-colored flag first flown over Meherabad near Ahmednagar, India, in the 1920s; dark blue is the top stripe, and red is on the bottom.
