The Making of a Weave

The Making of the Weave

The “threads” and the “weaves,” described in the previous section, have certain properties inherent to them. The thread’s pertaining property is texture, and the property of the weaves, that arises when threads are combined and woven together, is porosity - not completely unlike a tree, having branches with texture, and a crown with varying density.

Thus the creation of a thread, being what we apply the dynamisms onto, is different from the generation of a weave. The threads are created from a vertical line (1) which has had its shape transformed by a noise algorithm. This is the first generation of a fractal process since the line is then thickened and turned into a mesh, and the same noise algorithm is applied over and over again in increasingly diminishing scales to transform the mesh surface and apply texture (2).

In our project, we have explored several different dynamisms inspired by Hindu temple architecture. Out of these, three are used in the generation of our project proposal, one of which is taken straight from Hindu temple architecture: the “staggering” dynamism (3a), and two of which, at least to our knowledge, are not. These two we call “radial array,” (3b) and “mirroring” (3c). Radial array is the copying of a form in a circular manner, and mirroring is, quite simply the doubling of a form by mirroring it in any direction.

After the threads have been generated, we combine them using the dynamisms to form what we call a “sub-weave.” (4) Then we proceed with bending the subweave for it to achieve the desired shape and apply the radial array dynamism once more (5) to create a weave in the form of a dome-like structure.

Since we in our project are exploring possible ways of realizing a structure through the means of ceramic 3D printing, in order to extract elements from the overall structure possible of being 3D printed, several slicing operations need to be done following the procedural transformations of the dynamisms. The various dynamisms weave the threads together, causing several self-intersections in the overall structure. These are generally a problem since the boolean operations used to cut the structure into bricks require a geometry with one continuous, unbroken surface. The solution was to keep the information of each thread after the structure had been generated, and use “for each”-loops for each individual thread in the weave when performing the necessary slicing operations.

One of the first slicing procedures implies “skinning” the whole structure (6).

1. 2. 3a. 3b. 3c. 4.

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6. 7. 8.

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12. 10.

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Then we separate each pillar from the rest of the structure (7). This process is followed by a procedure involving the creation of intersection points using the lines that make the threads and intersecting them with a given number of planes arranged as a folding fan (8). The intersection points are then grouped together depending on the specific plane that intersected with each given line (9). In turn, these points are then used to create planes facing the direction of the line (10), used to cut the threads into bricks (11). The process of making a weave can be seen as an entangling and untangling process. Using for-each loops on each individual thread, we enabled ourselves to place the cuts in areas where they made sense, and using planes derived from the lines that make the threads, rather than turning the entire, woven structure into a single non-self-intersecting mesh by converting it into a volume and then back to a mesh (which would have been very strenuous, if at all possible, for our computers to do) we avoid having to arbitrarily slice it. By using planes that correspond with the direction of the lines, we also minimize the occurrence of too steep angles for the 3D printer to manage.

Additionally there are specific processes necessary to apply to some bricks, such as making the flat back surface of each brick, or the surface of an intersection between two bricks wavy (12) - explained why and how in the coming section.

As the last step, before the production of a physical brick can begin, the G-code must be generated for each individual brick sliced from the structure (13).