playing with Johnson solids!

This week Sarah Strauss was kind enough to return to California to teach us about tessellations, which is a phenomenon when simple tiles repeat to make solids. The most basic solids are called platonic solids. Some examples of these shapes are cubes, pyramids, tetrahedrals, etc. However, the solids that we are more interested in are called Johnson solids. These are way more complex than platonic solids because they are much more unpredictable in shape. Because there is no rule that each side must be the same polygon, it leads to more interesting 3D solids. With mathematical reasoning, it turns out that the faces of Johnson solids always have 3, 4, 5, 6, 8, or 10 sides. Without any rules in constructing these solids, there is more freedom to create different shapes. These shapes tend to look more crystal-like and abstract.

 

So, with around 2,000 different polygon-shaped tiles, we were able to construct some of these Johnson solids into beautiful shapes. Many of these solids have specific names that sound like a foreign language to me. For instance, try creating a Gyroelongated pentagonal cupola! Which looks like this à

There were mirrored and clear tiles that we were allowed to construct with. The mirrored faced ones led us to create our own kaleidoscope! As we each construct our own individual convex and concave shapes, we plan to make one giant installation of a tiled solid.

Combining Tiles

After doing our best to peel the tape off of about half of the 1000+ acrylic tiles, we started to combine them and make 3-D shapes. We used triangle, square, rhombus, pentagon, and hexagon tile shapes. All of the edges of the shapes are the same length so they can all connect to each other.


We started out by creating a platonic solid  (ex. cube or tetrahedron). Once that was finished we moved on to Archimedean solids (ex rhombicosidodecahedron). These are highly symmetric, convex polyhedrons composed of two or more types of polygons. Not only were the names hard to pronounce, but some of them were also difficult to build. This was a challenge but once we finished that we moved on to Johnson solids (ex square pyramid). A Johnson solid is a convex polyhedron, each face which is a regular polygon, but is not uniform. 


As a class we are beginning to build aperiodic non planar expanding surfaces with our tiles and combe them together. Right now it is nailed to a wall and we will continue to add pieces and maybe a johnson solid or two.

platonic solids in nature

Sarah Strauss introduced platonic solids to our class in a lecture ranging a wide array of sources, uses, and components. Most interesting to me was platonic solids found in nature. Sarah told us that Platonic solids occur frequently in nature, their forms are the complex crystallizations of minerals and also appear in skeletal remains of amoebic sea creatures. Ernst Haeckel illustrated these creatures in his study. With more research done online, I have found out more about his study as well as finding sources to look closer at the structure of these creatures.

http://algorithmic-worlds.net/Haeckel/haeckel.php

Ernst Heinrich Philipp August Haeckel was born in February 16, 1834 in Germany. During his lifetime he discovered and describes thousands of species, mapping genealogical tree relations to these life forms. Art forms of nature is his publication of over one hundred multi-colored illustrations of animals and sea creatures. Haeckel named thousands of new species from 1859 to 1887. His life work is beautifully illustrated in his book, in which one may see these geometrical forms found in nature. A number of these species of Radiolaria have skeletons shapes like various regular polyhedra.

Platonic solids occur in nature in which another example that Sarah showed us was in crystalline forms. The geometrical shapes that naturally occur in some crystals are very fascinating. These include the tetrahedron, cube, and octahedron.

Further, many viruses have the shape of a regular icosahedron. Viral structures are built on repeated identical protein units and the icosahedron is the easiest shape to assemble.

Also, liquid crystals have symmetries of platonic solids, as Dan Shectman found icosahedral structures in aluminum, which earned him the Nobel Prize in 2011.

Maya

 

Spoonstation Psychadelia at its Finest!

Initially when Lia told our class that we would be learning Maya, I was instantly intimidated. My roommate Amanda is a digital arts major, so she has to work a lot on Maya for 3D modeling of objects and characters, as well as rigging for animation. I also know several other people who use the program, and how complicated and tedious it can be. When Sarah Strauss came, I expressed my apprehension, and she reassured me that the program is very intuitive and that we would pick it up very quickly.

In our first session, we learned the basics of using polygons to build objects, and the basic functions that we can use to create more complex objects out of these polygons. I decided to model a spoon, because I thought it'd be a nice, easy object to learn Maya with. I quickly found that although my object was simple, it was very difficult for me to translate the spoons shape into the program. Everyone else seemed as if they were masters of Maya already, and here I couldn't even make my spoon look legitimate. I kept on messing with different tools and whatnot until my spoon finally looked how I wanted it to.

After we modeled our object, our next feat was to learn NERBS. I think NERBS are my favorite part of Maya, because you can literally create ANY 100% unique shape with them. All you need to do is create a line using the CV curve tool, make different curves with these points, and then use the loft tool to create a surface with them! That's it! Then once you have that surface, you have the complete creative freedom of stretching it, morphing it, bending it, etc. until it looks super trippy!

Once I had my spoons modeled, and my NERB landscape, I decided that I wanted to make a spoon space station...so the result is the new...the revolutionary...the inconceivable...SPOONSTATION!!

TADAAAAAAA!!!

INTENSE ANGLE!

just floatin in space, nbd.

BOOM.

After I assigned textures and colors to my objects, I needed to make the Spoonstation look like it was floating in space. To do this, I simply made a giant flat rectangular plane behind it, and put a space pattern on it. It's interesting to see how the stars in the background interact with the Spoonstation depending on which angle you're viewing it from. Especially in the first image, it kinda looks like it's in front of the moon or some other planet.

So, I made sure that I selected the optimum angle to view the Spoonstation from, and saved it as my final printing version so that I could then open it in Photoshop to finish it...

Yayyyy! Now it's just missing a scale figure, and something NASA related.

So then I opened up my Spoonstation image in photoshop, and tried to rack my brain to think of what I should put in as a scale figure. Thinking of things having to do with space, combined with a sense of nostalgia, I finally decided on putting in Zenon, from the Disney Channel Original Movie called, Zenon: Girl of the 21st Century. It was a beloved movie that I grew up with, and its memory lives on inside of my mind due to its ridiculously hilarious storyline, and millenium inspired fashions. If you haven't seen this movie, find it online or something; it's one of those movies that's so bad, it's good. For my NASA related thing, I decided to have SMAP floating in the distant background, just chillin and measuring the moisture in the soil to predict weather patterns. You know, the usual. 

I thought that the photoshop part of this project wouldn't take that long, but it took me a solid 5 hours to cut out Zenon and her friend, as well as the SMAP satellite, so that I could put them onto my Spoonstation. I did this of course by painstakingly erasing each pixel of the background of each picture until I could then place them into my Maya environment. Aaaaaand, without further ado, and before I ramble on and on even longer......here is....THE FINAL PRODUCT!

Zoom zoom zoom, make my heart go BOOM BOOM, my supernova guuuuurl! (These are actual lyrics from a song that's in the Zenon movie...again...horrible...but amazing.)

In all, I'm really proud of myself for making something that's at least halfway decent in Maya, considering I was pretty intimidated by the whole project at first. Sarah Strauss broke it down very simply for us, making it easy to pick up the basics very quickly, which then enabled us to mess with things in order to find more complicated ways of doing things. Even though I've conquered this stage of Maya, I know that I have only scratched the surface and that the next projects will probably be more difficult. This time I'm ready though, so bring it on SARAH, let's DO THIIIIIIIIS!

Sarah Strauss and the Creation of Whistlelandia!

I think it would be reasonable to say that I spent the week we had with Sarah Strauss essentially nerding out on Maya. I felt like a little kid on Christmas with so many toys to play with I just couldn't handle it. I love software with art and to be able to learn just the small things in Maya is plenty to keep my occupied for quite some time.

To start learning Maya, we created a simple object. My choice was a whistle, then we had to create an environment in which to put our object in. I decided to create my environment out of my object, thus is born Whistlelandia!

 The beginning of a foreign land...

Adding some scenery

Almost complete...

 Whistle flowers for your viewing pleasure

The Mars rover studying the splendor of a giant whistle flower

Aside from all the super cool things we learned in Maya, what I will take away from our time with Sarah is the idea of experimentation that we have been orbiting around all semester. In her lecture on Monday, she emphasized how important play was to the creative process. This is something that I think has pushed my art the furthest so far this semester. We've been focusing on the concept of, ok this is good, but how can I play with it and tweak it to take it to the next level. Her emphasis on having fun, loving what your doing, and experimenting are themes that I hope to carry through my artwork in the future.