I’ve been re-learning to code! Here are some spiral experiments I was toying with.
I use Rhino for all my 3D modeling at work and for crafting, and the most recent update to the Mac version brought in a Python scripting environment. Back in college I’d done some stuff in Visual Basic (which was what Rhino had available at the time), and had made some fun stuff, but I hadn’t been able to do much of that nature for a few years.
I’ve been working through some tutorials to get the hang of the language, but this little guy is the first thing I coded on my own in Python. Basically it just takes a starting object, rotates it around an origin by the golden angle (137.5°), scales it by a percentage, drops out a copy and then repeats. I was inspired by work by John Edmark at Stanford who makes 3D printed spiraling blooming sculptures that animate. So for the 3D versions I added a rotation of the spiraled object as a basic variation to toy with. For the near future I’ll probably just use the flat version to cut or engrave patterns into surfaces, but who knows, maybe I’ll have some ideas I’m excited about enough to have them 3D printed.
For people who’re curious, here’s the short little script I wrote that does the spiraling, rotating the spiraled object, and also alternates between 3 colors. If you’ve got Rhino, feel free to copy it, modify it, make your own stuff using it, whatever you like. It’s not very clean code anyway. Code after the break:
