Surface Designs

What is a surface design?
It is an ornamental enhancement to any surface to enhance it's visual appearance.

Over the last couple of weeks I have been paying more attention to the different surface designs that surround us.

Things such as:

The layout of these bricks, each in their own unique pattern. Yet all of them geometric (due to the nature of bricks being typically rectangular, or square)




Or some of these designs that were on the floor. Using two different colours/types of wood for a visual effect. Or perhaps the carpet I see everyday, and take it's odd designs for granted.




I do a fair amount of work with fabric, in which surface design is a very important part of some processes. The use of dying, stitches (such as embroidery and cross stitch), as well as printing, to create a design on the surface of these fabrics.



    


And of course, the ornamental carvings that have been done on wood for many years.



With some of these designs in mind, I decided to create some of my own 2D surface designs using Rhino3D

This one was inspired by some of the lines, and patterns on some of the fabric surface designs, and the carvings on the wooden door.






I based this one on some of the brickwork designs.



For this one I played with numerous circles, and the hatching and colouring of different layers.
 

For this last one I also played around with using one shape, and seeing what sort of pattern I could make with just the one shape, in this case I used numerous pentagons, and just two or three different colours.

 


I think I like the last two the most, they have an interesting, floral look to them.

Which one do you like the most?

Castle

I am learning how to use a program known as Rhino 3D.
To help with learning the basics, I made a castle using this program.

I started by making some basic shapes, essentially drawing a blueprint of the castle.
I used circles, squares, rectangles, and a single point to make these shapes. To make the squares perfect squares, I pressed shift, which locks the shape so it can only be a perfect square.

It has four towers, an outer wall, and an inner courtyard. The circle to the left is for the tops of the towers. I used osnap to align everything, it's a very handy tool for making sure that things are exactly where you want them.

Next, I changed to perspective mode and made the shapes 3D.

Once I had done that, I hollowed out the insides to make corridors, and so that the towers were also hollow. Not a very exciting castle if you can't go inside. I made smaller shapes, made them 3D, and connected them using the command Boolean Union, which makes the shapes into a single unit.

It was a bit tricky trying to make sure that the hollow part of the towers was connected to the corridors. I had to play around with a few different shapes to get the correct width. I used a function called Boolean Difference to subtract the one shape from the other.

I had to add another shape, a square with a half circle on top; I almost forgot the door!

I completed the door, made it 3D, and subtracted it from the castle walls. I first just had the opening through only the outermost wall, but thought it looked more authentic with it going through straight into the courtyard.

For the final step, I added the tops of the towers.

The Castle is complete!

Once I finished the Castle, I played around with the different view settings.

This one is called Arctic. 

This one, Artistic, looks like a clean sketch of the castle.

Ghosted shows a ghost image pf the insides of the castle. I think this one is pretty cool, like a haunted castle!

Raytraced makes it look like a sandcastle!

Rendered looks a lot like Arctic, but the shadows are a bit darker.

I think my favourite would be Raytraced, reminds me of the many sandcastles me, and my family have built together.