Joan, a friend of mine, posted she’d just run into some cool geometric 3D goodies that are printed on a 3D printer, a rapid prototype machine. There’s a woman, Bathsheba Grossman, who’s been doing math model artwork for many years, someone I’ve run across a few times over the years. Go feast your eyes on her work, it’s amazing. Bathsheba Grossman
Some of you who are new to reading me missed this, but years ago, I had made available some 3d geometric meshes I’d created for3D artists to download and play with in their 3D software. Take a look at some of what I made available here.
HEAVY IMAGE POST BEHIND THE CUT, but one you might be interested in seeing.
In particular, see the one with the red showing through from the inside?
One day UPS delivered an unexpected box to my doorstep. It contained the two things you see below. I was puzzled, since I didn’t order anything, and the shape I was holding in my hand looked familiar. But I couldn’t place it, until I read the enclosed letter. A guy who has a rapid prototype printer had discovered these meshes, and made a couple, just to show that this machine can print 3D things that were pretty complex, and would be difficult and terribly expensive any other way. These were printed on a 3D printer, then the organic “green” model was sintered- a process where bronze and stainless steel is wicked up into the model to replace the organic material, leaving you with a solid metal piece, as seen below. On the edge of one of the triangles below, you can see a shiny metal surface- that’s the stainless steel showing through, at the place where they had to cut the model off of the base plate during printing. As it turns out, the guy who made this is the very same guy who’s been working with Bathsheba. Small world.
After seeing how much the price has come down, I’m sitting here thinking it might be time for me to start tinkering with this stuff again, making some funky cool 3D meshes of arty stuff and printing them to have a tangible piece of artwork. Here’s one of these very same 3D meshes rendered in digital glass below.
I could create things like these digital sculptures in a tangible form:
and this one was done the same way
as was this one
(This started out as a 3D model of a human being- how I did it is covered in a short tutorial found <a href=”http://www.hilltopdesign.com/brycetutorials/poserparts/index.htm”>here</a>.)
Or I could stuff like this, made out of human arms and hands and other body parts like this 3D sculptures below.
Or something like these, created from rings and spheres.
and
or
Or something like this crazy intertwined crazy 3D mesh I made
or one like this
or
or one of these
or this one, which is nothing more than a 3D mesh of a tree, duplicated and rotated around a sphere.
or this bowl, made of nested and interlocked Celtic knot meshes I created
or this
or this sculpture made of nested dolphins
All of these, in theory, could be made as a tangible 3D piece which you could hold in your hand.
I suspect a lot of you have never seen the stuff I was doing before I got back into fractals recently, I’ve been working in 3D for many years, known mostly for my digital sculpture and abstract volumeteric artwork, which you can find in this gallery.
All of the images in this gallery were created in Bryce, a piece of software originally designed to make realistic landscapes. I used it for everything except landscapes.