top | item 24604746

Parametric lamp design using circle packings

206 points| stuffmatic | 5 years ago |stuffmatic.com

31 comments

order
[+] sdedovic|5 years ago|reply
If you're into this kind of design check out https://n-e-r-v-o-u-s.com/

They have some really cool (and very complicated) jigsaw puzzles [1] that I bought as gifts for my family. The Inifinity Puzzle is topologically a torus so you can infinitely tile it by taking a piece of off the left and placing it onto the right side.

I have a set of their coral coffee mugs [2] which I absolutely love, especially after toying around with my own reaction-diffusion based designs/art.

[1] - https://n-e-r-v-o-u-s.com/blog/?p=7821 [2] - https://n-e-r-v-o-u-s.com/blog/?p=8222

[+] abdusco|5 years ago|reply
Those mugs look gorgeous! I am worried that they're really tough to clean, though.
[+] 1MachineElf|5 years ago|reply
Thanks for sharing. My SO loves puzzles & now I have an i teresting gift option for her.
[+] gjm11|5 years ago|reply
Pedantic note: footnote 1 (supporting the statement that there's nontrivial mathematics behind circle packings) links to two Wikipedia pages, for "Circle packing" and "Circle packing theorem"; the first of those is actually completely irrelevant because it's about how densely you can pack fixed-size circles into a given space, a topic that turns out to have basically nothing to do with the sort of circle packing that's actually relevant to the article.

(Thurston should really have used a different term. "Circle tiling", perhaps.)

[+] stuffmatic|5 years ago|reply
I love pendantic notes! Steiner chains, Thurston's notion of circle packing and circle packing as an optimization problem are quite different from a theoretical point of view. However, they all have one thing in common, and that is that the end result is an arrangement of circles that you may or may not be able to turn into a lamp :)
[+] matsemann|5 years ago|reply
Very satisfying design. The code for generating the laser cutting files would be cool to see. It looks very well though out, by even engraving numbers, all the correct holes etc.
[+] idank|5 years ago|reply
Seconded, the design and execution look really good. Would love to try this out with my laser.
[+] pwinnski|5 years ago|reply
I really love the math and the design of this!

I'm not entirely sure I would want a lampshade that blocks most of the light from the bulb, but I'm sure there are applications that make sense, right?

[+] tobyhinloopen|5 years ago|reply
It doesn’t block - it reflects, using white surfaces
[+] cpach|5 years ago|reply
I think it would work well e.g. over a kitchen table.
[+] rmetzler|5 years ago|reply
I would guess it’s possible to do a similar design with translucent plastic.
[+] runxel|5 years ago|reply
Lovely done! I wonder what their software stack is. My bets go to Grasshopper.

Too bad the blog has no RSS btw.

[+] stuffmatic|5 years ago|reply
Thanks for the kind words! I'm using a custom built javascript framework that runs in a web browser. Should probably have mentioned this in the post :)

Others have requested RSS too, by the way. I'll look into it.

[+] jacquesm|5 years ago|reply
Very nice, lovely animations too to show how parameters changing would affect the final result.
[+] bborud|5 years ago|reply
Oh great, there goes another evening of fiddling with Fusion 360. :-)

It would be so neat if it was easy to have script elements and inputs (sliders, knobs) as part of a design in Fusion 360 so that one could make interesting parametric geometries easy to play with.