“”The Schoolyard Jewel”: tribute to an episode of the same name from the cult British sitcom of the 1970’s, “Has Anyone Seen the Portcullis?”. Rhino, SubD’s and oodles of Grasshopper.
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wonderful!! thanks for sharing!
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Thanks Kyle!
looks sick!
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I’ll take that as a compliment.
Hi Ethan, your jewel design looks really good!
Could you please share some tips on making the following parts of this design (the grasshopper side of things, if possible)?
1 the green vines (I see they twist around each other and make knots?)
2 the butterfly wings
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Thanks for your interest! Here’s an outline:
The knots are basically SubD’s piped or lofted along curves. The loops surrounding the rubies were generated mathematically along a base curve, and the ones attached to the wings were done by good old fashioned control point manipulation, a laborious process. Ultimately, all the SubD’s were joined seamlessly using Bridge Faces or Stitch Mesh.
The wings were first created by a Sweep2 along the two boundary curves and a series section curves that were created through a combination of formula and tweaking. This results in one untrimmed surface. Some of these section curves were then used to split the wing into 8 trimmed surfaces. In order to later Sporph the pattern onto each wing section, I had to recreate each section as an untrimmed network surface by using their edges.
There’s probably an easier way to go about this, but the pattern of flakes, meant to evoke Japanese lacquer technique, first required producing a heightmap from a SubD:
The heights, lowest to highest correspond to gold, darker gold, blue, and black. The surface below the SubD was meshed using Triremesh and exploded into about 13 K faces or “flakes”. The centroid of each face was projected onto the SubD and the z values for each point were reparameterized from 0 to 1.
I defined a set of domains so that each flake would be identified as a particular color, so 0 to .3333 was gold for example. Consecutive Domain creates the domain and Find Domain assigns the index for the color to be used. If I just did this, I’d get four distinct color fields, so I added some Perlin Noise to the values, then some faces, say in Domain 1, dark gold, would get bumped up into 2 blue, or down into 0 gold, giving that overall sprinkled look.
So, now I have the base surface under the SubD, a list of 13K faces, another list of 13K color indices running from 0 to 3, and the 8 target surfaces on the wings. These flakes were all Sporphed onto the targets and all the resulting 8X13K flakes were put into 4 groups using Create Set and Member Index, corresponding to the colors. Each group of mesh faces were then joined, ending up with four meshes that individually look like a kind of color dust, but when combined, give that specked effect. If I haven’t lost you by now, I’m not doing my job. 
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Thank so much for your detailed explanation Ethan! The techniques you used are indeed challenging but you explained very clearly and it’s very worth the effort to understand.
13k sounds like a lot of faces for gh. Was it laggy for you?
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"It’s 13 K simple mesh faces, not breps or surfaces. For GH, that’s nuthin’!
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it is compliment, i would like see the real production piece in metal with finish details, amazing design!
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