Artist Dolf Veenvliet [macouno]has released a very nice series of patterns, all created in Blender. These patterns all find their origin in the 11 possible regular, and semiregular polygon tesselations. They are inspired by for instance the work of MC Escher, and the tilings in the Alhambra, and Alcázar in southern Spain.
Dolf wrote:
I have been creating designs, and specifically patterns for years now. I've been in to them ever since my time at the art academy, well over a decade ago. Last year I started working on new tesselations using Blender. I'd used Blender for years before, but never for my patterns.
Turns out, Blender is great for it! Linked objects and bezier circles are wonderful design tools.
You may remember I've been writing, and giving away python scripts for Blender through the www.alienhelpdesk.com website for years as well, and people always respond in the most positive way. The same goes for the Petunia model I made for the 2007 Blender Conference Animation Festival. Someone even made a paper version of it recently!
This has made me rethink my old attitude to my art. I've been spoonfed the idea that you need to always protect your copyrights, and source files all through my education, and professional life. But giving things away is much more fun, and in the end also more rewarding!
So after a long long think I decided to release all my pattern files under a creative commons attribution license. Now anyone is free to download/use them for whatever they want, as long as they credit me as the source/creator.
I hope there's a few people out there that will enjoy playing with the files, and I can't wait to see the results!
17 Comments
Oh guys, I released a few more things as well, see the thread at blenderartists.com for more about that:
http://blenderartists.org/forum/showthread.php?t=143913
Consider it my christmas present to everyone! ;)
Dolf
thanks, I always liked the patterns! :)
Wow, amazing work!
Thank you.
Any tutorials on this technique would be much appreciated! Very nice work.
Great, but I'm actually more interested in a tutorial HOW he made these patterns.
Wow, Great pictures ! Thank you for releasing the files.
@ubergrafik : I think that there is no real need of a tutorial. I have looked inside one of the Blend files : an intensive use of curves, but there is no real trick. Everything is in the skill of the Artist. All this patterns are great pieces of art.
Congratulations Macouno !
Nice work, thanks !
Though I was a little disappointed that it's not procedural textures made using nodes... :P
great patterns, very generous of you to share them with us. Maybe you can also make a tutorial how you create such patterns in blender that would be awsome :)
I like the textures that Dolf made; the 'real wall paper ' size of them is cool!
Would like to mention http://www.mapzoneeditor.com/ .
A real nice program too for procedural textures..................
Hey folks, thanks for the generous responses. I'm not planning a tutorial any time soon, but if you want to learn more about patterns this page is a good starting point: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tilings_of_regular_polygons
hi macouno,
i remember you were working on them during the conference, now you ended up in a beautyful work, congratulations!
Thank you very much, it is generous.
I also love patterns, and have started using Blender to draw them. I'm looking forward to checking your .blends for ideas on how to improve my work - as well, of course, as just to enjoy what you've done.
Merry Christmas to you, too!
These are really nice. Thanks!
Wow people... 3000+ downloads, and 3GB traffic in the 24 hours since this item was put up by Bart. That's a lot more than I expected, and really confirms to me that it was the right move to release!
Thanks again for all the positive responses!!
Thanx a lot for your gift, Macouno !
For those interested in the art of creating patterns by writing programs there's a powerful & exciting (free) tool available at
http://processing.org
under the same name. It's Java based, can be incorporated into WEBpages (via applet technology) and is capable of animation & interactive handlung of patterns.
There are also tutorials in bookform available (I recommend Ira Greenberg's volume) as well
as a huge collection of online examples & infos (there's also a user community you may contact).
Wow, pretty sweet! Thanks so much, Dolf! Please give us a tutorial on how you create these patterns! That would be great.
Thanks, and merry Christmas!
-b
thanks