Technique · Fields
Organic lattice sculpture
A glossy white form of curved struts and thin webbed sheets pierced by oval holes, on a black mirror, turning slowly.
Organic lattice sculpture is a field drawn for every pixel by the graphics chip. Every piece on Synapse Drip is made from a recipe that layers techniques like this one, and you can change any of it in the Studio.
Good to know
- Selective laser sintering builds a form from nylon powder layer by layer, with the unmelted powder holding every overhang up, so fine lattices and holes can be printed without supports.
- Barbara Hepworth made her first pierced sculpture in 1931, and Henry Moore began piercing his forms in the early 1930s too: the hole lets the space behind a form become part of it.
- The architect Michael Hansmeyer prints columns whose surfaces carry millions of facets, found by a program rather than drawn by hand.
- Generative designers such as Neri Oxman and Nervous System make furniture and jewellery with this kind of form, grown by a program and then 3D-printed in plastic or metal.
- Bone is a natural lattice: its inner trabeculae line up along the lines of stress, so it is both light and strong.
The mathematics
- A smooth minimum, min(a, b) - h^2 k / 4 with h = max(k - |a - b|, 0) / k, joins two distance fields with a rounded fillet of size k; here k is 0.13.
- A hole is a subtraction: the form is the smooth maximum of its distance field and the negative of the cutter's, so the cutter's edge melts into the shell in the same way that two struts melt together.
- The distance to an ellipsoid has no closed form, but k0 (k0 - 1) / k1, with k0 = |p / r| and k1 = |p / r^2|, is a good first-order estimate, accurate close to the surface where the march takes small steps.
- The reflection in the floor is a second ray: the view ray is mirrored about the floor plane and marched into the same form.
In art
- Biomorphic form, shapes drawn from bone, shell and seed, was a language of sculpture from Jean Arp in the 1920s to Eero Saarinen's furniture of the 1950s.
- A glossy white form on a black mirror is the language of product photography and the museum plinth: the reflection doubles the form and the black takes away the room.
More ways to use it
Related techniques
Nebula and stars · Liquid · Droplets · Network · Terrain and maps · Neuron · Order to chaos · Fractal tree